Quote

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.

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
Degrees
Reaches
Aware
Intensity
Coming
Equally
Becomes
Appearance
Looking
Degree
Whatever
Intense
Energy
Whenever
Certain
Towards
Scrutinizing

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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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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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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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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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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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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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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
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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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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
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In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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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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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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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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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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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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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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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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