“The reverse process is extremely important to me — that artistic images can inspire to words and different myths, and that in certain cultures this process has been the normal relation between images and words. It is known as a rule in the so-called Germanic art, and through the middle ages heaps of such stories are directly inspired by fantastic images.”

— Asger Jorn

Quote in Jorn's letter to anthropologist Francis Huxley (1970) - on the relation between words and images
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Asger Jorn48

Danish artist 1914–1973

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“A person who thinks by images becomes less and less capable of thinking by reasoning, and vice versa. The intellectual process based on images is contradictory to the intellectual process of reasoning that is related to the word. There are two different ways of dealing with an object. They involve not only different approaches, but even more important, opposing mental attitudes. This is not a matter of complementary processes, such as analysis and synthesis or logic and dialectic. These processes lack any qualitative common denominator.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 214
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

“As the Word of God is God's image, so the word of man is his image, and "a man is known by his speech."”

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) English poet

Vol. II, Ch. V Aphorisms and Extracts, p. 72.
Memoirs and Correspondence (1900)

“The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

1950s, Conversations With Artists, 1957

“Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. …It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

“The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

The Ideas of Art, Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, nr 2, December 1947, p. 43.
1940s

“The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying "fascism," "progress," "science," or "justice" does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

“And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image.
When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 4

“Within image theory (e. g., Beach, 1990; Mitchell & Beach, 1990), it is suggested that important components of decision-making processes are the different “images” that a person may use to evaluate choice options. Images may represent a person's principles, goals, or plans. Decision options may then match or not match these images and be adopted, rejected, considered further, depending on circumstances.”

Michael Hogg (1954) Australian psychologist

Deborah J. Terry, Michael A. Hogg. Attitudes, Behavior, and Social Context: The Role of Norms and Group Membership. 1999

“Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato, interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato, looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Writings on Physics and Philosophy http://books.google.com/books?id=ueTd4g7pc5MC (1994) 16. "Science and Western Thought" p. 142

“Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.

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