John Berger Short Quotes

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

John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

John Berger
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

John Berger
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

John Berger
He clashed his colors together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.

John Berger
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

John Berger
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

John Berger
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

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

John Berger
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

John Berger
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

John Berger
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

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

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

John Berger
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

John Berger
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

John Berger
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

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

John Berger
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

John Berger
What makes shit such a universal joke is that it's an unmistakeable reminder of our duality, of our soiled nature and of our will to glory. It is the ultimate lèse-majesté.

John Berger
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
A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

John Berger