The ‘remembrance’ is complementary to the ‘lived experience’. In it is deposited the growing self-alienation of man, who catalogues his past like a dead possession . . . the relic derives from the corpse, the ‘remembrance’ from the dead experience, which is defined euphemistically as ‘lived experience’.

Walter Benjamin

An image is an idea through which the mind considers a thing as being present; however it indicates more the present state of the human body, rather than the nature of the external thing.

Baruch Spinoza

Pygmalion himself would not succeed in making his work believe that it possessed a life, despite all his efforts; it is only when he puts down his sculptor’s chisel and falls to his knees like a poor man that divinity descends upon him.

Franz Rosenzweig

Desire, which arises out of Reason, cannot have excess.

Baruch Spinoza