The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGERAll weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
More John Berger Quotes
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Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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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)
JOHN BERGER -
The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
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You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
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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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Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
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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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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
JOHN BERGER -
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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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
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
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Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
JOHN BERGER