Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
JOHN BERGERThe human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
More John Berger Quotes
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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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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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.
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To be naked is to be oneself.
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Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
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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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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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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.
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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.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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All publicity works upon anxiety.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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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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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
JOHN BERGER