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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
John Berger
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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Happens
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Younger
Pass
Happen
Grows
More quotes by John Berger
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
John Berger
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
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
John Berger
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.
John Berger
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
John Berger
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society ... recognises nothing except the power to acquire ... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.
John Berger
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
John Berger
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
John Berger
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
John Berger
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
John Berger
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
John Berger
The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
John Berger
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
John Berger
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
John Berger
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
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
John Berger
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger