Top 100 John Berger Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
#3. Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
John Berger
#4. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.
John Berger
#5. Never again will a single story be told as though its the only one.
John Berger
#6. Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
John Berger
#7. 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
#8. The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
John Berger
#9. What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
John Berger
#10. Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.
John Berger
#11. I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement.
John Berger
#12. The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
John Berger
#13. I've learnt something more. The expectation of a body can last as long as any hope. Like mine expecting yours. As soon as they gave you two life sentences, I stopped believing in their time.
John Berger
#14. The industrial society ... recognises nothing except the power to acquire ... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.
John Berger
#15. When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate
John Berger
#16. In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
#17. Until 1954, I'd only ever thought of being a painter, but I earned my money when and where I could. You could say I drifted into writing.
John Berger
#18. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#19. There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.
John Berger
#21. The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
#22. Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.
John Berger
#23. 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
#24. Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
#26. 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
#27. We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.
John Berger
#28. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisible dream.
John Berger
#29. Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.
John Berger
#30. The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
John Berger
#31. [O]ften 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 ...
John Berger
#32. Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
John Berger
#33. Hope is not a form of guarantee; it's a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
John Berger
#34. To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
#35. What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
#36. They can't foresee what we intend to do next. This is why they lose their nerve. They can't cross the zone of silence they herd us into. A zone bordered on their side by the distant din of their false accusations, and on our side by our silent final intentions.
John Berger
#37. I very seldom read back into what I've written.
John Berger
#38. The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years.
John Berger
#39. The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
#40. When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
John Berger
#41. 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
#42. I think I'm very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine.
John Berger
#43. 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
#44. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
John Berger
#45. At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
John Berger
#46. I was scared of one thing after another. I still am.
Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can't be both.
John Berger
#47. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
John Berger
#48. Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
John Berger
#49. Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
John Berger
#51. To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen ... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
John Berger
#52. The promise is that again and again from the garbage the scattered feathers the ashes and broken bodies something new and beautiful may be born
John Berger
#53. Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
John Berger
#54. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.
John Berger
#55. Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
John Berger
#56. 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
#57. I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
John Berger
#58. Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
John Berger
#59. The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.
John Berger
#60. Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
John Berger
#61. The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death. The same sense of culmination.
John Berger
#62. When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
John Berger
#63. 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
#64. Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
John Berger
#65. Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
John Berger
#66. The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
John Berger
#67. Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
John Berger
#68. The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.
John Berger
#69. We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger
#70. A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
John Berger
#71. 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
#72. The single word that counted on Wednesday was the one that came from the muzzle of a gun, addressed to somebody on their knees. Better to choose our hour than to accept this. We know each other. We've known each other from the time of Crocodilopolis. [Letter unsent]
John Berger
#73. It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
John Berger
#74. Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
John Berger
#75. The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection
the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.
John Berger
#76. So time doesn't count, and place does?' I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.
John Berger
#77. 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. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
#78. For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
John Berger
#79. Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
John Berger
#80. Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
#81. Publicity is in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future... According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.
John Berger
#82. We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
John Berger
#83. Perspective is not a science but a hope.
John Berger
#84. If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
John Berger
#85. Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.
John Berger
#86. It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.
John Berger
#87. The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
John Berger
#88. In ethics, there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.
John Berger
#89. 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
John Berger
#90. It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
John Berger
#91. To become bored with eating is to be bored with life.
John Berger
#93. In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
John Berger
#94. I have never thought of writing as a profession. It is a solitary independent activity in which practice can never bestow seniority.
John Berger
#95. We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
John Berger
#96. In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.
John Berger
#97. Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal
John Berger
#98. I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
John Berger
#99. Globalisation means many things. At one level, it talks of trade, which since the 16th century has exchanged goods and now, increasingly, ideas and information across the globe. But globalisation is also a view of the world - it is an opinion about man and why men are on the world.
John Berger
#100. Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.
John Berger
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