John Berger Quotes

My father could look straight ahead but concentrate on something on the very edge of his vision, almost nearly behind him.

Once I started to look i finally began to see.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

The more you look, the more you see.

You don't always have to look in the distance for what's going on over there, when you actually see what's right in front of you.

If you are wired to your memory, repetitions will happen and redundancy will come; but if you are paying attention, that changes your ability to look at things.

What you look at hard seems to look at you.

Observe what is with undivided awareness.

Look with all your eyes, look.

Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

Look where you are going because you will inevitably go where you are looking.

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.

Seeing is a gift that comes with practice.

Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned - not to see what is not.

Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.

One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.

The more you look, the more you will see.

“How ever did you see that?” “Because I looked for it.”

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.

Art is about paying attention.

But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.

The eyes see not what is before them when the mind is intent on other matters.

Obviously we can't do what we do if no one is paying attention.