The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGERPoetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
More John Berger Quotes
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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
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
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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.
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
JOHN BERGER -
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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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
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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.
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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
JOHN BERGER