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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.

John Berger

The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
JOHN BERGER

Change Constellation Event Imagining Night People Sky Surround Threaded
All creation is in the art of seeing.
JOHN BERGER

All Creation Art See
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER

Children Looks Speak Recognize Word
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGER

Dwelling Home Hostile Language Men Place Potentially
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
JOHN BERGER

Accident Anything Birth Impossible Injustice May Nothing Remain
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

Enjoy Hand Look Mirror Morally Naked Paint Painting Pleasure Vanity Women
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
JOHN BERGER

Being Depend Envy Experience Glamourous Happiness Illusion Precisely Reassurance Share Solitary
Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
JOHN BERGER

Different Forget Look Meaning Pain Remember Thing
This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
JOHN BERGER

Accept Callous Human Inhuman Know Live Society Worth
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGER

Between Just never One Ourselves Thing
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

Bureaucrat Greater Illusion Impersonal Interest Observe Others Power Themselves
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

Before Century Poverty Priorities Result Scarcity Set World
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER

Basket Dog Dream Haire Like Open
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.
JOHN BERGER

Contradiction Interest Meeting Natural Photo Photographer Place Use Viewer
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
JOHN BERGER

Advertising Assembly Being Competing Language Merely Message Messages Same Use
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGER

Art Country Italian Mountain Space Top Traditional

We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.

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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.

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Popular Authors

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