John Berger Quotes

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

Things seen are mightier than things heard.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

Seeing is a gift that comes with practice.

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

What happens behind your eyes is more important than what happens in front of them. This is a reversal from the way that we have been taught and the way that we had experienced the world as five sensory humans.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw

Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

Some of us come on earth seeing – some of us come on earth seeing color.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect of the organ of vision.

Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.

The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.

I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.

I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.

I see all of them. All the colors.

Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice.

An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography)

My life is really a history of observing forms and taking in imagery. I don't mean in a photographic way, I mean in a way of feeling them structurally.