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 BERGERTo live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
More John Berger Quotes
-
-
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGER -
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER -
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGER -
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER -
Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER -
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
JOHN BERGER -
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
JOHN BERGER -
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
JOHN BERGER -
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
JOHN BERGER -
All publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGER -
Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
JOHN BERGER