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 BERGERWhat is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
More John Berger Quotes
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
JOHN BERGER -
A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
JOHN BERGER -
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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 -
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGER -
We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGER -
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
JOHN BERGER -
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGER