Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGERMatisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
More John Berger Quotes
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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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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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGER