John Berger Quotes

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.

A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.