Frans Hals - Two Paintings ("Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House" and "Regents of the Old Men's Alms House") - c. 1664

“Hans, an old man of over eight, was destitute. Most of his life he had been in debt. During the winter of 1664, the year he began painting these pictures, he obtained three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. Those who now sat for him were the administrators of such public charity… In this confrontation of the Regents and Regentesses stare at Hals, a destitute old painter who has lost his reputation and lives off public charity; he examines them through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e., must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper. This is the drama of these paintings.”
- John Berger, from Ways of Seeing

Arthur Schopenhauer - from "On Human Suffering"

“This is the mystery…it reveals to us that all those beings living at the present moment contain within them the actual germ of all which will live in the future, and that these therefore in a certain sense exist already. So that every animal in the full prime of life seems to call to us: ‘Why do you lament the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species which came before me had not died?’

However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same people who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.”

John Berger, from "Ways of Seeing"

“If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen.
The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue.
And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this—an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things.’”

Rene Magritte - “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1935

Agnolo Bronzino - “Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love” - 1545

Johannes Vermeer - “Maid with Milk Jug” - 1657