John Berger Quotes

I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.

The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.

I'm sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.

Anything having to do with what is happening inside people has political significance to me. That is why I like the term "holistic politics."

We all started under the sun and finished under the lights.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Nothing that’s worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that.

People see successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy. But that is a world away from the facts. It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard. A man can fail easily; he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is.

To be human is to have a whole spectrum of these experiences that arise within us.

Badness you can get easily, in quantity. The road is smooth and lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to do it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard.

It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic" that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.

People relate to fighters so much because fighting reflects life.

Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre

I think most people who decide to become a musician have to be prepared for some degree of struggle. It makes the art better if you go through some struggles. To be an artist, in any form, you have to develop some sense of compassion and empathy - it's an important quality for everyone to have, on a human level. But I think, as part of our job, you have to be able to do that, so suffering, tends - if you allow it - to let you look on the bright side. It will help with those senses.

The tournament means so much to me as well as the things I do in Africa. I thought it could also work well together.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine, that there is so much of the human in every man, that the life of any one individual, however obscure, if really and vividly perceived in all its aspirations, struggles, failures, and successes, would command the interest of all others.

What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

Every germ of goodness will at last struggle into bloom and fruitage...true success follows every right step.

It's not going to be easy, it's going to be worth it.

When you conquer something, it means you fought for it.

We must know the difference between sweat and tears. Sweat is wet. Tears are wet. Sweat is salty. Tears are salty. But progress comes through sweat. Progress never came through tears.

I feel like the actual, the most beautiful thing about a song is that it is something that goes out there in the universe and people use it in the way that they need it in their lives.