The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGERTracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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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 unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
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(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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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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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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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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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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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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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
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Do 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.
JOHN BERGER