Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGERNo painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
More John Berger Quotes
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGER -
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
JOHN BERGER -
One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
JOHN BERGER -
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
JOHN BERGER -
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
JOHN BERGER -
This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
JOHN BERGER -
Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGER -
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
JOHN BERGER -
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
JOHN BERGER -
But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGER -
Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGER -
We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
JOHN BERGER






