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John Berger Quotes

John Peter Berger was 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. He lived in France for more than half a century.

✵ 5. November 1926 – 2. January 2017
John Berger photo

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Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
John Berger: 28 quotes20 likes

Famous John Berger Quotes

“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 book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing (1972)

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

John Berger

“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 book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing

John Berger Quotes about animals

“Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.”

John Berger

Source: About Looking (1980), Chapter "Why Look at Animals?"

“Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. … That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone.”

John Berger

Source: About Looking (1980), Chapter "Why Look at Animals?"

“In the first stages of the industrial revolution, animals were used as machines. As also were children. Later, in the so-called post-industrial societies, they are treated as raw material. Animals required for food are processed like manufactured commodities. … This reduction of the animal … is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units. Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man. The mechanical view of the animal’s work capacity was later applied to that of workers. F. W. Taylor who developed the “Taylorism” of timemotion studies and “scientific” management of industry proposed that work must be “so stupid” and so phlegmatic that he (the worker) “more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type.” Nearly all modern techniques of social conditioning were first established with animal experiments. As were also the methods of so-called intelligence testing. Today behaviourists like Skinner imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals.”

John Berger

Source: About Looking (1980), Chapter "Why Look at Animals?"

John Berger Quotes

“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

Source: Keeping a Rendezvous

“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 book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing

“A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing (1972)
Context: According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man... A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you... By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. (p. 45-46)

“The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.”

John Berger

“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

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

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing

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

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing (1972), p. 148

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

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing

“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

“All publicity works upon anxiety.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing

“The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Chap. 1
Ways of Seeing (1972)

“To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing

“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

Source: The Shape of a Pocket

“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.”

John Berger

Source: Here Is Where We Meet: A Story of Crossing Paths

“Yet why should an artist's way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not of course our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action. The kind of actions implied vary a great deal. … A work of art can, to some extent, increase an awareness of different potentialities in different people. The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the word be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist's way of viewing his subject. Goya's way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres.”

John Berger

Source: Selected Essays of John Berger (2014), P. 18

“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 in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.”

John Berger

Source: About Looking (1980), Chapter "Why Look at Animals?"

“Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of "The Free World." For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing (1972), p. 130

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

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing (1972)

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