Quotes from John Berger

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

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.

All publicity works upon anxiety.

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

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

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

I was scared of one thing after another. I still am. Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can't be both.

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.

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.

The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.

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.

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

It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

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

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

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.

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

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

In ethics, there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

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

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.