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.
JOHN BERGERBuildings 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
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The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
JOHN BERGER -
The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
JOHN BERGER -
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
JOHN BERGER -
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER -
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 BERGER -
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
JOHN BERGER -
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER -
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGER -
Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGER