John Berger Quotes

The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. *

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.

Anybody who passes more than a day in eternity is as old as God could ever be.

The garden is a kind of sanctuary.

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.

Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.

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

Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal

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

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

All creation is in the art of seeing.

She was now the center of what surrounded her. All that was not her made space for her.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.

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

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

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection
the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.

Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched.

Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.

A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

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.

The zoo cannot but disappoint.

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

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

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

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

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

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.

We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

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.

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

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years.

I have never thought of writing as a profession. It is a solitary independent activity in which practice can never bestow seniority.

In ethics, there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.

To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisible dream.

The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

Hold Everything Dear

The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death. The same sense of culmination.

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

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Preachers love only their own voices.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

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

A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.

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.

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.

'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.

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

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

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

All publicity works upon anxiety.

To become bored with eating is to be bored with life.

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

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

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.

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

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

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

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

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

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

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

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

To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

Perspective is not a science but a hope.

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

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.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.

I very seldom read back into what I've written.

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

Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

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

To be naked is to be oneself.