Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGERWithout ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
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Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
JOHN BERGER -
Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
JOHN BERGER -
The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
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It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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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