The icon and the idol determine two manners of being for beings, not two classes of beings. - Jean-Luc Marion

The idol depends on the gaze that it satisfies, since if the gaze did not desire to satisfy itself in the idol, the idol would have no dignity for it.

What if God did not have first to be, since he loved us first, when we were not? And what if, to envisage him, we did not have to wait for him within the horizon of Being, but rather transgress ourselves in risking to love love.

What one gives actually coincides only rarely with the thing itself whose ownership one transfers to someone else. Quite the opposite: The majority of the time the given thing remains the possibly expensive but often negligible token and sign of what one is really giving and what is not a thing. When I give my time, my life, my affection, my word, my loyalty, in short, my love, that is, the only things that we really would like to receive from the other, they precisely do not concern mundane things one could possess, stockpile, or keep in a box. Thus to mark these “nonthings” in phenomenality (such as time, love, one’s word, loyalty, etc.), I really do give them, [but] I give a different thing, actually a first thing, which serves as the pure and simple symbol for the nonthing that is actually given (a ring, a jewel, a certificate, a signature, etc.).