What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.
JOHN BERGERJapanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
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We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
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What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
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What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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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.
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You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGER