John Berger Quotes
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Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
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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.
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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks becoming exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such.
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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.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.
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The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
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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.
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
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The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn't like a confidence and a promise.
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Perspective is not a science but a hope.
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In ethics, there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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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.
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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.