The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGERAll weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
More John Berger Quotes
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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 -
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
JOHN BERGER -
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
JOHN BERGER -
The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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 -
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.
JOHN BERGER -
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
JOHN BERGER -
Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
JOHN BERGER -
Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGER -
Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGER






