Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
JOHN BERGERThe stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
More John Berger Quotes
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
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To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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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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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGER -
I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
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That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
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)
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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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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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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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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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
JOHN BERGER -
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGER