John Berger G Quotes

#1. The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.

John Berger

#2. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity," thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

John Berger

#3. Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident

John Berger

#4. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

John Berger

#5. 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

#6. There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that ... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

John Berger

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

John Berger

#11. Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

John Berger

#12. 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

#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 living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

John Berger

#15. At some point when tending someone you love who is in pain, you reach the edge of a lake, and you look at each other with such joy at the stillness. [Letter unsent]

John Berger

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.

John Berger

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

John Berger

#24. Never again will a single story be told as though its the only one.

John Berger

#25. 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

#26. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

John Berger

#27. Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.

John Berger

#28. 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

#29. Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

John Berger

#30. 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