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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
2c43701	Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live.			John Berger
0ea8fbf	This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle : partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself... ... In no other culture has the artist been thought of in this way. Why then in this culture? We have already referred to the exigencies of the open art market. But the struggle was not only to live. Each time a painter realized that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of..			John Berger
34b73b4	The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity, even a term of endearment; the word is impartial: the usage is all. The boon of language is that it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience--everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it..			John Berger
82b367c	l'shy lSGyr@ hy lty tkhyfn, w l'shy lDkhm@ lty bmknh 'n tqtl hy lty tmnHn lshj`@.			John Berger
f179b1f	A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.		organicity spoken-language wholeness	John Berger
606d120	l yktb 'y sh`r 'kthr mn qSyd@ wHd@. qSyd@ tmtd msf@ l`mr klh, wqd yZn 'nh yktb qSy'd qSyr@ mkhtlf@. lkn fy lHqyq@ nh jmy`an 'jzun mn lqSyd@ lTwyl@ dhth.			John Berger
092529e	They can't foresee what we intend to do next. This is why they lose their nerve. They can't cross the zone of silence they herd us into. A zone bordered on their side by the distant din of their false accusations, and on our side by our silent final intentions.			John Berger
834a1a8	The canvas is on the easel now, as large and white as a sheet that has never been slept in. My paintings have become larger and larger as I have grown older. As a young painter you are overwhelmed by the complexity of your subject. Every crease, every dimple, is an equally startling revelation. It's like your first girl. You don't understand her. You can only copy her - hesitantly. Later you become shamelessly yourself. You create in your i..			John Berger
894a984	The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity", thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure."			John Berger
790ad89	This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody's side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.		courage hope tyranny	John Berger
4afec8c	Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.		understanding-via-drawing	John Berger
880669c	To become bored with eating is to be bored with life.			John Berger
98b77b7	lmDy hw lzmn lwHyd ldhy lsn sjn lh. ymknn tGyyr lmDy tmman km nrGb. m l ymknn lqym bh hw tGyyr nty'jh.			John Berger
934574c	Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal		pre-verbal mediation translation	John Berger
227c6e2	The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.			John Berger
d5e3315	Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.		photography communication	John Berger
14877da	This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It's what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that's what interests ..		death post-mortem memory	John Berger
7660d1f	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.			John Berger
0085851	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.			John Berger
be100c5	Preachers love only their own voices.		subjectivity self	John Berger
032e1fa	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.			John Berger
c499c10	Oil painting, before anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.			John Berger
902ecb2	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.		thing translation	John Berger
65b0932	The happiness of being envied is glamour.		social-anxiety validation glamour	John Berger
53ec32e	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.		loss humour life clown	John Berger
02249c5	Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.		life place-in-life	John Berger
77af838	Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich,' Peter Ustinov the playwright recently observed with succinct clarity. Although			John Berger
1136b04	The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. *			John Berger
63e2ae0	The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism the pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.		capitalism consumerism	John Berger
f5bd6f4	The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection--the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.		religion creationism	John Berger
54ca162	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.			John Berger
6f0f948	Matisse bir zamanlar bir santimetre kare mavi ile ayni mavinin bir metre karesinin ayni sey olmadigini soylemisti. Alanin yayginligi tonu degistirir. Ayni sekilde, mavi bir daire ayni maviden bir kareyle ayni sey degildir. Sinirlarin sekli de tonu degistirir. Ama bu yalnizca baslangic. Her ton doku tarafindan, cevresindeki diger tonlarla goruntunun yarattigi uzam tarafindan, resmin icindeki ve uzerindeki isik tarafindan ve goruntunun cekim ..			John Berger
b6ba4ae	Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be ..			John Berger
26e3fc2	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.			John Berger
0225455	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.			John Berger
cb45105	All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.			John Berger
a83ae32	Having seen this reproduction, one can go to the National Gallery to look at the original and discover what the reproduction lacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees the original, that it is a famous painting of which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction.			John Berger
5fdd5a0	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. Yet very few people are aware of what has happened because the means of reproduction are used nearly all the time to promote the illusion that nothing has changed except t..			John Berger
59dc44c	Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible.This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.			John Berger
1ad49a1	The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app\|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?			John Berger
9c8a7f7	The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. It is worth comparing this famous text of Bakunin's with one of Picasso's most famous remarks about his own art. 'A painting', he said, 'is a sum of destructions.			John Berger
2aacf62	The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.		prayer the-white-bird	John Berger
a50709b	uygarligin olmadigi yerlerde ev bir evle degil, bir eylem ya da eylemler kumesiyle temsil edilir. herkesinki kendine ozgudur. bir zorunluluk duyulmadan secilmis eylemler kendi iclerinde gecici olabilirlr belki, ama herhangi bir binadan daha kalici ve saglam siginaklar sunarlar. Ev o zaman bir mekan olmaktan cikar, yasanan bir hayatin anlatilmamis oykusu olur. En can alici noktaysa, evin aslinda insanin adindan baska bir sey olmadigidir - bi..			John Berger
3c598f7	Yildiz kumelerni ilk kesfedip onlara ad veren oykuculerdi. Bir avuc yildiz arasina dussel bir cizgi cekince kimlik ve birer imge kazaniyordu yildizlar. Cizgiye islenmis yildizlar bir anlatiya islenmis olaylar gibiydi. Yildizlarin kume olusturdugunu duslemek kuskusuz ne yildizlari ne de onlari ceviren kara boslugu degistirdi. Degistirdigi sey insanlarin geceleyin gogu okuma bicimiydi.			John Berger

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