We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGERIt dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
More John Berger Quotes
-
-
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
JOHN BERGER -
For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGER -
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
JOHN BERGER -
The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGER -
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
JOHN BERGER -
What 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.
JOHN BERGER -
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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 -
A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGER -
A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
JOHN BERGER -
You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.
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 -
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER -
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
JOHN BERGER -
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGER -
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER