We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGERThe relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
More John Berger Quotes
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The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
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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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To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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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.
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Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
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A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
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A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
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All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
JOHN BERGER