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 BERGERDo you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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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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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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One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
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Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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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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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
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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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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.
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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
JOHN BERGER