Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
JOHN BERGERBy contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
More John Berger Quotes
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A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGER -
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 BERGER -
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER -
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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 -
(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER -
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGER -
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGER -
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself.
JOHN BERGER -
But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER -
These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
JOHN BERGER -
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 BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGER -
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
JOHN BERGER -
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
JOHN BERGER -
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGER -
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGER -
Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
JOHN BERGER -
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER