John Berger Quotes

The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends ...

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

Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man...

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

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the pre...

Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to ...

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of he...

The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who...

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is mean...

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set....

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you calle...

This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what ac...

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

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result...

Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, ...

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themsel...

But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, h...

Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people wer...

Preachers love only their own voices.

The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually ...

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to t...

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral funct...

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. ...

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

Perspective is not a science but a hope.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply in...

Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is al...

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflec...

Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, howeve...

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

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

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate d...

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive ...

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

I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We tak...

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

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

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of...

My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carr...

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or a...

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of ta...

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnec...

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, ...

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course...

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do t...

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing ot...

The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of ...

A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either activel...

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet bec...

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

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialis...

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first lea...

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue...

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics det...

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. ...

A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only t...