Quotes by John Berger

About John Berger:

John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Resmin ilk konusu hayvanlardı. Ve en baştan başlayıp Sümer, Asur, Mısır ve ilk dönem Yunan resminde devam eden bir çizgide, bu hayvanların tasvirleri olağanüstü derecede hakikidir. İnsan gövdesinin tasvirinde eşdeğer bir ‘gerçek-g...

John Berger

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

John Berger

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

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

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

John Berger

When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or ...

John Berger

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a met...

John Berger

Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much se...

John Berger

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

John Berger

Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.

John Berger

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonig...

John Berger

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the ...

John Berger

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

John Berger

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.

John Berger

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, ...

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

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

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

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

John Berger

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

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Berger
  • DescriptionBritish painter, writer and art critic
  • BornNovember 5, 1926
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Art Historian; Writer; Painter
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize