Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used…

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

— John Berger

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter…

— John Berger

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything…

— John Berger

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which…

— John Berger

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

— 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…

— John Berger

There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that... the…

— 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…

— John Berger

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

— John Berger

In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled…

— John Berger

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

— John Berger

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death.…

— John Berger

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive…

— John Berger

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

— John Berger

“Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.”

— John Berger