John Berger Quotes

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.

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

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Truth is an illusory notion.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog". The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog."

There is nothing outside of us that is not at the same time in us, and as the external world has its colors the eye, too, has colors.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .

... if a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.