English art critic (1926-2017)
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
JOHN BERGER
A Fortunate Man
Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays and Articles
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.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.
JOHN BERGER
Bento's Sketchbook
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER
Once in Europe
Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all man-made objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
He clashed his colors together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER
Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
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.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGER
Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing
Your lips, beloved, taste like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under your tongue.
JOHN BERGER
To the Wedding
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
The Guardian, December 19, 1991
My knowledge tends to lead me to the conclusion that miracles do exist, that a man's life can be completely transformed. Perhaps fate is just an accident, but the important point is that it is beyond anybody's control. It happens to them. It can still happen to me. It is possible that my fate is still to be decided.
JOHN BERGER
Corker's Freedom
Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message. The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
JOHN BERGER
Confabulations