Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably.
If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images...
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.
It is easy to have a false picture of the processes called “recognizing”; as if recognizing always consisted in comparing two impressions with one another. It is as if I carried a picture of an object with me and used it to perform an identification of an object as the one represented by the picture. Our memory seems to us to be the agent of such as comparison, by preserving a picture of what has been seen before, or by allowing us to look into the past (as if down a spy-glass).