Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
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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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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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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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
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This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
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The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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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.
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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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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.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
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The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGER