The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
JOHN BERGERThe opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
JOHN BERGERTo be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGEREvery painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGERMen look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGERThe 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.
JOHN BERGERGlamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
JOHN BERGERThe past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
JOHN BERGERFor the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
JOHN BERGERThe zoo cannot but disappoint.
JOHN BERGERThe unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
JOHN BERGEREmigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
JOHN BERGERNo painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGERTo be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
JOHN BERGERUnlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGERThe surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
JOHN BERGERThe poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
JOHN BERGER