The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
JOHN BERGERWhat is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
More John Berger Quotes
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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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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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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
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Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
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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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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.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
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But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGER