Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
JOHN BERGERAll photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
More John Berger Quotes
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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
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You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
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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.
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
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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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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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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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What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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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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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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The 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
JOHN BERGER