Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
JOHN BERGERThe heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
More John Berger Quotes
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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 BERGER -
The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
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 -
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
JOHN BERGER -
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGER -
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
JOHN BERGER -
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER -
For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
JOHN BERGER -
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
JOHN BERGER -
All creation is in the art of seeing.
JOHN BERGER -
It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
JOHN BERGER