Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGERWords 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
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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.
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For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
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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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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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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 past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
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I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
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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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It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER