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 BERGERThe contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
More John Berger Quotes
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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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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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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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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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
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What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
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We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
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Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
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This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGER -
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
JOHN BERGER -
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.
JOHN BERGER