Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGERTo be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
More John Berger Quotes
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGER -
Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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 -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER -
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
JOHN BERGER -
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGER -
By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
JOHN BERGER -
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER






