Iconography Quotes

• How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

  Polly Toynbee

  Art, Knowing, Culture

  "This is a clash of civilisations - between reason and superstition" by Polly Toynbee, www.theguardian.com. April 13, 2006.

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• If geography is prose, maps are iconography.

  Lennart Meri

  Maps, Geography, Prose

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• One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

  Anish Kapoor

  Spiritual, Space, Fuzzy

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• Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Wall, Pain, Media

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• Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Reality, Self, Organization

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.428, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.

  Harrison Ford

  Character, Opportunity, Thinking

  "Star Wars Archive: Harrison Ford, Solo Artist". Interview with William Thomas, www.empireonline.com. June, 2002.

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• I am interested in circulating past iconography in the present in order to get to the future.

  Mariko Mori

  Past, Order

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• I am interested in Icons, not just religious works but also contemporary icons. I also like the way the Pop movement of the 60s took subjects from consumer products and people - soup cans, comic books, film stars - and elevated them through art, just like in traditional iconography.

  Horace Panter

  Religious, Art, Stars

  Source: louderthanwar.com

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• I was trying to do like a spaghetti western but using World War II iconography.

  Quentin Tarantino

  War, Trying, World

  "The Rachel Maddow Show", www.nbcnews.com. February 11, 2010.

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• Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

  James Wolcott

  Art, Book, Design

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• The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

  Shane Claiborne

  God, Christian, Stars

  Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw (2009). “Jesus for President”, p.197, Harper Collins

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• People have a very proprietary relationship with Superman. It's important to respect the iconography and the canon, but at the same time, you have to tell a story.

  Zack Snyder

  People, Important, Stories

  Source: collider.com

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• Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

  Herbert Read

  Art, Men, Giving

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• The whole iconography of ancient science is simply the fruit of wishful thinking.

  George Sarton

  Thinking, Fruit, Ancient

  George Sarton (1993). “Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C.”, p.13, Courier Corporation

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• My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.

  Natasha Trethewey

  Memories, Blood, People

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• When something is iconic, if you're very careful and delicate, you can add onto that iconography. It can expand. People have attached so much to it themselves, and connected to it, so the risks are big, but the potential is enormous, at the same time.

  Hugh Dancy

  People, Risk, Add

  Source: collider.com

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• To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

  Sam Harris

  Ignorance, Our World, Luxury

  "The End of Faith". Book by Sam Harris (pages 22-23), 2004.

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• Erotic movies - they don't even make it anymore. Even the erotic magazines don't really look like the ones you could find in the '70s. You have much more extreme iconography of what is sexy. It's very cold. There's nothing that links to real life.

  Gaspar Noe

  Sexy, Real, Erotic

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In Celtic Ireland the name Leo was Lugh, another solar hero and mystic. In Wales he was Llew, to the Romans Lugus, to the Sumerians Lughal. Its not the same dude on walkabout, it's the Astrological sign of Leo. In the Christian iconography we have one of the Evangelists represented by a Lion. In the Nativity scenes we see 4 animals around the cradle of the Son/Sun king. One of these is also a Lion. Christians probably believe that there was one in the area and just happened to wander into the inn to take a peek at sleeping Jesus. Good thing it wasn't very hungry.

  Michael Tsarion

  Christian, Jesus, Kings

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• We're creating a different universe with different rules and a different tone and different villains. We were very careful to honor the iconography of Spider-Man, but we wanted to tell it in a new and different way [in the film].

  Marc Webb

  Men, Different Universes, Creating

  "Emma Stone and Marc Webb Talk THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, Honoring the Marvel Icon, and Why Andrew Garfield is the Perfect Spider-Man". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. March 20, 2012.

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• I drove from New York to California by myself. The iconography of travel and escape is everywhere in my photographs... So actually becoming a runaway was crucial. I had this idea that I'd make my way across the frontier and find my story as it was actually happening in the landscape.

  Justine Kurland

  New York, Ideas, California

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• My visual landscape as a child was the inside of a lot of these old churches. And the Baroque drama of the things was what I was first engaging with artwise. I'm much more attracted to the aesthetic of religious iconography than the actual religious side. The passion and the blood and the violence and the gaudy side of it I find really fascinating.

  Florence Welch

  Religious, Children, Drama

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• In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

  David Foster Wallace

  Religious, Children, Reality

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• Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.

  James Wolcott

  Men, Mad, Culture

  "Prime Time’s Graduation" by James Wolcott, www.vanityfair.com. May 2012.

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• I don't take trouble at all to conform a screenplay to my iconography. I don't say, "We can't do that - the audience wouldn't accept it." I try to take the limitations of what is required to play a leading character and then screw with them.

  Harrison Ford

  Character, Play, Trying

  "Star Wars Archive: Harrison Ford, Solo Artist". Interview with William Thomas, www.empireonline.com. June, 2002.

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