John Berger Quotes

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

I love that perhaps we don't see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them.

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.

However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

Every viewpoint is a view from a point.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.

One man's constant is another man's variable.

Sensation is amphibious: at the same time it joins us to and divides us from things. It is the door through which we enter into things but also through which we come out of them and realize that we are not things.

You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.

High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way - everything is interdependent, not absolute.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;