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
JOHN BERGERCompare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
More John Berger Quotes
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Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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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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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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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.
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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)
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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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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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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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Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
JOHN BERGER -
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGER