the fluid zone between the world in itself and our image of it is what painting explores, that is its core activity

--- Karl Ove Knausgaard, So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch (2019), p. 221

Context

And yet it would be a big misunderstanding to think that whatever has no form, no shape and no weight — in other words, our thoughts, feelings, notions, ideas, memories, mental images — always dissolves in the presence of the reality of the now. One could also argue the opposite, that reality is something we have learned how to see, that it appears in and affirms an image we have beforehand. Of course, it isn't that simple either, but the fluid zone between the world in itself and our image of it is what painting explores, that is its core activity. That we still remember Munch, and that his art is still alive in our culture, is because he went further in exploring that territory than most of his contemporaries.

But in what way is his art still alive? The actual pictures exist in actual places — most of them in museums — in the same way that the motifs they depict exist in concrete places. But it isn't in the realm of the concrete that they live on, it is in our notional world, in the minds of each and every one of us.

in this mass of nature, there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capital letters, yet in stenography and short characters, something of divinity

--- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, see Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend, Gutenberg Etext #586

Context, On Philosophy

"Beware of philosophy," is a precept not to be received in too large a sense: for, in this mass of nature, there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capital letters, yet in stenography and short characters, something of divinity; which, to wiser reasons, serve as luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and, to judicious beliefs, as scales and roundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabrick.

We are only that amphibious piece, between a corporeal and a spiritual essence

--- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, see Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend, Gutenberg Etext #586

Context, On Humankind:

"These are certainly the magisterial and masterpieces of the Creator; the flower, or, as we may say, the best part of nothing; actually existing, what we are but in hopes, and probability. We are only that amphibious piece, between a corporeal and a spiritual essence; that middle form, that links those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature, that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures."

Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable. For the world, I count it not an inn, but an hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

--- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, see Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend, Gutenberg Etext #586

Context

"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable. For the world, I count it not an inn, but an hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in. The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on: for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas's shoulders. The earth is a point not only in respect of the heavens above us, but of the heavenly and celestial part within us. That mass of flesh that circumscribes me limits not my mind. That surface that tells the heavens it hath an end cannot persuade me I have any. I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty. Though the number of the ark do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my mind. Whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm, or little world, I find myself something more than the great. There is surely a piece of divinity in us; some- thing that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun. Nature tells me, I am the image of God, as well as Scripture. He that understands not thus much hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the alphabet of man."

 

every historian is the obedient servant of his or her own point of view

--- Paul Cartledge, quoting "a famous Dutch historian," speaking on a BBC4 episode of In Our Time on The Mytilenaean Debate, 20 Jun 2019, starting timecode 26:40

In context:

A famous Dutch historian once said that the historian -- every  historian -- is the obedient servant of his or her own point of view. So it is the historian who selects what episodes, what  events -- it's the historian who chooses what to sources he  or she will accept and it's the historian who, as Thucydides says in his very first sentence, writes the war.