Top 150 John Berger Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “All creation is in the art of seeing.”

— John Berger

2. “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”

— John Berger

3. “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”

— John Berger

4. “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.”

— John Berger

5. “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

6. “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”

— John Berger

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.”

— John Berger

8. “The zoo cannot but disappoint.”

— John Berger

9. “To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.”

— John Berger

10. “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”

— John Berger

11. “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

12. “History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.”

— John Berger

13. “Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.”

— John Berger

14. “Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.”

— John Berger

15. “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

16. “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

17. “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.”

— John Berger

18. “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

19. “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

20. “The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.”

— John Berger

21. “Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.”

— John Berger

22. “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

23. “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”

— John Berger

24. “Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.”

— John Berger

25. “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

26. “Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.”

— John Berger

27. “It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.”

— John Berger

28. “Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.”

— John Berger

29. “The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester’s motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.”

— John Berger

30. “Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of clouds.”

— John Berger

31. “All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.”

— John Berger

32. “If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.”

— John Berger

33. “The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.”

— John Berger

34. “At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.”

— John Berger

35. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

36. “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

37. “I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.”

— John Berger

38. “If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.”

— John Berger

39. “The photographic moment for Cartier-Bresson is an instant, a fraction of a second, and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. The photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant, but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told.”

— John Berger

40. “Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

— John Berger

41. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

— John Berger

42. “Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.”

— John Berger

43. “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.”

— John Berger

44. “A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at.”

— John Berger

45. “Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.”

— John Berger

46. “Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.”

— John Berger

47. “A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.”

— John Berger

48. “When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.”

— John Berger

49. “The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.”

— John Berger

50. “Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.”

— John Berger