“In every particular in which a picture constitutes a sight that is not identical with the sight represented, the picture will fail to communicate the represented object.”

Part II. Of the Extent of Sensible Knowledge.
The Physiology of the Senses: Or, How and what We See, Hear, Taste, Feel and Smell (1856)

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

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In every particular in which a picture constitutes a sight that is not identical with the sight represented, the pictur…" by Alexander Bryan Johnson?
Alexander Bryan Johnson photo
Alexander Bryan Johnson 35
United States philosopher and banker 1786–1867

Related quotes

Karl Marx photo

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Actually from State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin, paraphrasing Marx in The Civil War in France.
Misattributed

Vladimir Lenin photo

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”

Source: (1917), Ch. 5 [Lenin, Vladmir Illych, The State and Revolution, 1917, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm, Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!]

Paul Klee photo

“Pictures have their skeleton, muscles, and skin like human beings. One may speak of the specific anatomy of the picture. A picture representing 'a naked person' must not be created by the laws of human anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 840, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

William Golding photo
Hermann von Helmholtz photo

“Every great deed of which history tells us, every mighty passion which art can represent, every picture of manners, of civic arrangements, of the culture of peoples of distant lands or of remote times, seizes and interests us, even if there is no exact scientific connection among them.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist

"On the Conservation of Force" (1862), p. 278
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
Context: Every great deed of which history tells us, every mighty passion which art can represent, every picture of manners, of civic arrangements, of the culture of peoples of distant lands or of remote times, seizes and interests us, even if there is no exact scientific connection among them. We continually find points of contact and comparison in our own conceptions and feelings; we get to know the hidden capacities and desires of the mind, which in the ordinary peaceful course of civilised life remain unawakened.
It is not to be denied that, in the natural sciences, this kind of interest is wanting. Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications. But intellectual satisfaction we obtain only from a connection of the whole, just from its conformity with law.

“For those out on the water it provided a bizarre soundtrack to a sight that so many would only be able to describe as “like watching a moving picture.””

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 194

Hans Küng photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)
Context: The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

Algernon Blackwood photo

“No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory.”

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) English short story writer and novelist

Source: A Prisoner in Fairyland

Related topics