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 BERGERPicasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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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.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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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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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
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The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
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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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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGER