“Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”

— Octavio Paz

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 1

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Octavio Paz 71

Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… 1914–1998

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“!-- Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path that snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-colored hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer’s head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat rooftops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one’s feet; the dust that clings to one’s sweat-drenched skin, makes one’s eyes red, and chokes one’s lungs; i --> Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 1

“Love is a vision, a firefly that majestically glows in the night for some time; then, it winks at you and swiftly disappears.”

Vinko Vrbanić (1951)

Love

“Whenever an authority disappears, another one appears; and if a star sets, another one rises.”

Muhammad al-Mahdi (869–941) 12th and last Imam in Twelver Shia Islam

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.53 p. 185
General Quotes

“The Buddha said, "Elements come together and form this body. At the time of appearing, elements appear. At the time of disappearing, elements disappear. When elements appear, I do not say "I" appear. When elements disappear, I do not say "I" disappear. Past moments and future moments do not arise in sequence. Past elements and future elements are not in alignment. This is the meaning of ocean mudra samadhi."
Closely investigate these words by the Buddha. Attaining the way and entering realization does not necessarily require extensive learning or realization. Anyone can attain the way through a simple verse of four lines. Even scholars of extensive learning can enter realization through a one line verse.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

Ocean Mudra Samadhi (1242)

“Mental states of every kind — sensations, feelings, images— which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it — have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. Although the inwardly - turned look may no longer be able to find them, nevertheless they have not been utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they, continue to exist, stored up to speak, in the memory.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 1; Cited in: Richard F. Thompson, Stephen A. Madigan (2013) Memory: The Key to Consciousness, p. 87

“Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

“The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so — all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.
I am a nihilist.
I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: 1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1988), Ch. 18 : On Nihilism, translation by Sheila Faria Glaser.

“When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them.”

Al-Muradi

Al-Muradi, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas, 11th century; Translated and cited at leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index http://www.leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index_eng.html, 2015

“But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesn't change, that the first 'vision' remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a painting; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 313
Quotes, 1930's

“It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

“Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”

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Octavio Paz 71

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