A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERThe 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
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
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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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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.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
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The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
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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.
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
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Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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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.
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Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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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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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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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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Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
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It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
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The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
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We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
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The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER