Top 150 John Berger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.”

— John Berger

52. “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

53. “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

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

— John Berger

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

— John Berger

56. “Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.”

— John Berger

57. “The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.”

— John Berger

58. “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

59. “One’s death is already one’s own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one’s life.”

— John Berger

60. “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.”

— John Berger

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

— John Berger

62. “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.”

— John Berger

63. “Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched.”

— John Berger

64. “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. It is worth comparing this famous text of Bakunin’s with one of Picasso’s most famous remarks about his own art. ‘A painting’, he said, ’is a sum of destructions.”

— John Berger

65. “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.”

— John Berger

66. “Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

— John Berger

67. “A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.”

— John Berger

68. “Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live.”

— John Berger

69. “That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”

— John Berger

70. “Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.”

— John Berger

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

— John Berger

72. “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

73. “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

74. “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”

— John Berger

75. “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

76. “Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.”

— John Berger

77. “Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.”

— John Berger

78. “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.”

— John Berger

79. “To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.”

— John Berger

80. “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

81. “Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.”

— John Berger

82. “Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

— John Berger

83. “The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.”

— John Berger

84. “Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”

— John Berger

85. “All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.”

— John Berger

86. “Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.”

— John Berger

87. “The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.”

— John Berger

88. “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

89. “Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say goodbye, maybe we do it for this reason – to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.”

— John Berger

90. “Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.”

— John Berger

91. “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.”

— John Berger

92. “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

93. “Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one’s feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.”

— John Berger

94. “Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.”

— John Berger

95. “Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.”

— John Berger

96. “The happiness of being envied is glamour.”

— John Berger

97. “To be naked is to be oneself.”

— John Berger

98. “I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.”

— John Berger

99. “A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.”

— John Berger

100. “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

— John Berger