Quote

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

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
Self
Boredom
Must
Ties
Never
Dogs
Chains
Bored
Sausages
Dog
Accustom
Blessing
Sausage
Together
Chain

More quotes by John Berger

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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
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To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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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.
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Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering music with painting poetry with design fine art with propaganda photographs with typography diagrams with action the studio with the street.
John Berger
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
John Berger
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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
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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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The envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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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
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
John Berger
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
John Berger
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
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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.
John Berger
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality... could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
John Berger
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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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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.
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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