Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
JOHN BERGERI wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
More John Berger Quotes
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
JOHN BERGER -
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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 -
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 -
Words 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.
JOHN BERGER -
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
JOHN BERGER -
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER -
What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.
JOHN BERGER -
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
JOHN BERGER -
This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
JOHN BERGER -
(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER -
To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGER -
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
JOHN BERGER -
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
JOHN BERGER -
Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
JOHN BERGER -
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER -
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGER -
What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
JOHN BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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 -
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
JOHN BERGER