#john berger

closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to

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What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes.

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Nearly every artist can draw when he has made a discovery. But to draw in order to discover – that is the godlike process.

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When I was taking my shower an idea came into my head: every pain slides, at one point, into the word NO, before continuing

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Others disapproved of him because he devoted his whole life to art, and they saw he was not a genius. For them, the nobility

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closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to

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Of all trees, birches are perhaps the most like grass. They are small, pliant, slender; and if they promise a kind

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We do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live – if one follows the biblical sequence of events – after the Fall.

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The information with which we are bombarded concentrates on the spectacular: on shocking, violent events wherever they

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Nobody should presume that evil has no spiritual power. Indeed, one of the principal errors of the two centuries concerned

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Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as the person seen crossing the street

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The human imagination, however, has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice

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The capacity to fall in love is now thought of as natural and universal — and as a passive capacity. (Love

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Poetry makes language care because it renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result of the poem’s labor, the

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There are two types of colour: apparent colour and actual colour. Apparent colours – the colour of the sky, the sea, sunlight

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All art is meaningless to those for whom life itself is only a spectacle.

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Roughly there are three separate ways in which we can fight for what we believe, and the way we fight depends upon the

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I do not want a public with great aesthetic sensibility. I want a public with one thing– hope.

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It is a strange solitude that [artists] choose. Yet we do choose it so there is no point whatsoever in regretting it. It is

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This century, for all its wealth and with all its communication systems, is the century of banishment […]

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“I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to ...

The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.

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If we [artists] think of ourselves as special creators, we are wrong. Everyone creates in the same way as we do. They invent,...

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Yet this silence is lined, I promise you, it is lined with tenderness. And if you doubt this, remember touching with your

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