John Berger Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  John Berger

  Looks, Relation, Just One

  87 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Choices, Looks

  59 Copy quote

• 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

  Sight, Evening, Earth

  "Ways of Seeing". Book by John Berger, 1972.

  99 Copy quote

• All creation is in the art of seeing.

  John Berger

  Art, Creation, Seeing

  30 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Love, Men, Watches

  48 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Real, Painting, Absence

  1988 In New Statesman and Society,15 Jul.

  24 Copy quote

• Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

  John Berger

  Photography, Choices, Decision

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.344, Vintage

  49 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Children, Looks, Speak

  "Ways of Seeing". Book by John Berger; Penguin Books, 1972.

  9 Copy quote

• I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

  John Berger

  Art, Revenge, Past

  John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.9, Vintage

  53 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Berger

  Priorities, Scarcity, World

  John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.234, Vintage

  59 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Feelings, This Life, Immortal

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  Soul, Alive, Legends

  John Berger (2012). “G. John Berger”, p.197, A&C Black

  40 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Beauty, Dresses, Naked

  "Ways of Seeing". Book by John Berger, 1972.

  63 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Inspirational, Photography, Light

  John Berger, Jean Mohr (2016). “Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography”, p.75, Bloomsbury Publishing

  21 Copy quote

• The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

  John Berger

  Photography, Memories, Cameras

  1978 New Statesman,17 Aug.

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Vanity, Mirrors, Hands

  30 Copy quote

• All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

  John Berger

  Photography, Pain, Opposites

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Artist, Perfection

  John Berger (2011). “A Painter of Our Time”, p.168, Vintage

  26 Copy quote

• The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.

  John Berger

  Art, People, Theatre

  45 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Dogma, Form, Pursuit

  "The bloody outcome of two worlds at war" by John Berger, www.theguardian.com. July 16, 2005.

  27 Copy quote

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

  John Berger

  Photography, Flirting, Flow

  1983 In the New Statesman, 22/29 Dec.

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

  John Berger

  Dog, Blessing, Self

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Talking, Evil, Needs

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.762, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Berger

  Past, Wish, Prisoner

  44 Copy quote

• Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

  John Berger

  Stars, Night, Sky

  John Berger (2014). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos”, p.8, Bloomsbury Publishing

  54 Copy quote

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