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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
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
Draw
Invisible
Draws
Others
Incalculable
Also
Accompany
Something
Observed
Make
Destination
Visible
More quotes by 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
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
John Berger
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
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger
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.
John Berger
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
John Berger
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
John Berger
The envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
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
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
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
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
John Berger
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
John Berger