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 BERGERBy contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
More John Berger Quotes
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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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.
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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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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
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What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
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No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
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It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
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Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
JOHN BERGER