John Berger Quotes

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again, — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people.

Movies are the greatest art form the world has come up with yet. If you don't use them to the full extent and you don't give people as much as you possibly can, you're doing a disservice to it.

Art curates compassion. Art to me breaks down walls and allows us to step into somebody else's shoes.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

Pop culture has none of the vibrancy that you find in the folk culture, where people speak directly to their own experience in the human condition.

I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed. Beyond the meaning (of a work of art), it is important to people. Without it, lives can be dull.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.

Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

Popular literature and culture used to reflect people's aspirations, pain, and passion. All those particular things are no longer available to us.

I felt the comics grew because they became the common man's literature, the common man's art, the common man's publishing.

The great thing about cinema is that it's a great binder. It brings people from across the world together, often erasing the lines between geographies, languages, familiarity, and the like. Cinema is art and art, they say, is a reflection of life and society, so the way we tell our stories is the main differentiator for me.

There is not one soul on this planet, whether it is a person living in Ethiopia, or in Florida, or in Canada, whose life is not as complex and as rich as your own.

I try to connect to human emotion. I'm always looking for something primal, something really base that is beyond language, that people understand beyond language.

Throughout history, the arts and humanities have helped men and women around the globe grapple with the most challenging questions and come to know the most basic truths. In our increasingly interconnected world, the arts play an important role in both shaping the character that defines us and reminding us of our shared humanity. This month, we celebrate our Nation's arts and humanities, and we recommit to ensuring all Americans can access and experience them.

We must realize that it is best to focus on our oneness, to re emphasize what is the same about each of us rather than dwell on what is different.

Art is the expression of a man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to the universe's unspoken message.

I think that's what all art is for - for people to express what it is to be human. That's the purpose of it.

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.