Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGERIf every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
More John Berger Quotes
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What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGER -
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER -
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
JOHN BERGER -
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
JOHN BERGER -
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
JOHN BERGER -
The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
JOHN BERGER -
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
JOHN BERGER -
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGER -
All publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGER -
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGER -
A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER