John Berger Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

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

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.

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.

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.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

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

All creation is in the art of seeing.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

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

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.

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

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.

The zoo cannot but disappoint.

Today the discredit of words is very great.

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.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

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.

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

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.

A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence... defines what can and cannot be done to her.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.