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)
JOHN BERGERThe animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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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.
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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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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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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.
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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
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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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What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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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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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGER