Quotes from John Berger

Preachers love only their own voices.

Gerçekte hep iki zaman aras?nday?zd?r: Gövdenin ve bilincin zaman? aras?nda. Bütün öbür kültürlerdeki ruh ve gözde aras?ndaki ayr?m iÅŸte buradan kaynaklan?r. Öncelik her zaman ruhundur ve yeri bir baÅŸka zaman?n akt??? çizgidedir.

In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.

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.

The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.

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.

Publicity is in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future... According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.

When I'm drawing - and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning - I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning.

Sorrel soup: "You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away. Of home? Certainly not, not even for Poles. Of what then? ...Of survival, perhaps.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

There is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and an au revoir! Alternately and ad infinitum.

Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion.

The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why /but the editorialists forget it /terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.

Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and—at its most extreme—abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd. […] to emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

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

We have no word for this darkness. It is not night and it is not ignorance. From time to time we all cross this darkness, seeing everything: so much everything that we can distinguish nothing. You know it, Marisa, better than I. It's the interior from which everything came.

For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.

Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection--the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.