Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
JOHN BERGERThe past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
More John Berger Quotes
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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
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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
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The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
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No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
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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.
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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.
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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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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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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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
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGER






