John Berger Quotes

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.

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.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

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.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.