The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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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You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER -
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
JOHN BERGER -
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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 -
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 -
For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGER -
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
JOHN BERGER -
A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGER