Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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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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.
JOHN BERGER -
To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
JOHN BERGER -
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGER -
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGER -
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGER -
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
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 -
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
JOHN BERGER -
A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
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 -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER -
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
JOHN BERGER -
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGER