John Berger Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”
-- John Berger

#Sight #Sun #Evening
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting â€œVanity,â€ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
-- John Berger

#Vanity #Mirrors #Hands
“To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.”
-- John Berger

#Feelings #This Life #Immortal
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.”
-- John Berger

#Priorities #Poverty #Scarcity
“All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.”
-- John Berger

#Marriage #Different
“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
-- John Berger

#Sex #Teenager #Believe
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
-- John Berger

#Love #Men #Watches
“As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.”
-- John Berger

#Government #People #Tactics
“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

#Invisible #Destination #Draws
“What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity.”
-- John Berger

#Mean #Thinking #Drawing
“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”
-- John Berger

#Orphan #Form #Autobiography
“I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.”
-- John Berger

#Art #Revenge #Past
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”
-- John Berger

#Inspirational #Photography #Light
“Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.”
-- John Berger

#Photography #Drawing #Doe
“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”
-- John Berger

#Compassion #Order #World
“Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.”
-- John Berger

#Dream #Culture #Publicity
“Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”
-- John Berger

#Beauty #Dresses #Naked
“Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.”
-- John Berger

#Village #Emigration #Metropolis
“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”
-- John Berger

#Wall #Reading #Book
“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.”
-- John Berger

#Beauty #Naked #Oneself
“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.”
-- John Berger

#Wall #Book #Stories
“The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.”
-- John Berger

#Dream #Dog #Philosophy
“A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. 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

#Animal #Two #Pigs
“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.”
-- John Berger

#Beautiful #Nature #Believe
“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”
-- John Berger

#Looks #Relation
“The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.”
-- John Berger

#Past #Wish #Prisoner
“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
-- John Berger

#Photography #Opposites #May
“Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
-- John Berger

#Believe #Men #Paris
“Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart... Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.”
-- John Berger

#Loss #Space #Together
“Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. 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.”
-- John Berger

#Photography #Decision #Choices

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