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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.

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
Practice
Baskets
Within
Strictly
Living
Difficulty
Dream
Dog
Human
Dreams
Materialist
Humans
Philosophy
Hares
Great
Imagination
Confines
Like
Open
Basket

More quotes by John Berger

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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.
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The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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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.
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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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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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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 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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The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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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.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
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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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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.
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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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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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