The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGERWe can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
More John Berger Quotes
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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
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Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
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What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
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Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
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The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
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This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
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The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER -
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER