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 BERGERThose who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
More John Berger Quotes
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER -
Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
JOHN BERGER -
Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
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 -
Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
JOHN BERGER -
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
JOHN BERGER -
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGER -
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
JOHN BERGER