John Berger Quotes

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Old is always fifteen years from now.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

I only remember the future.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

‎The past is always an invented land.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

History is like a clock, it tells you your time of day.