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Photography, Because It Stops The Flow Of Life, Is Always Flirting With Death.
-John Berger
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Photography, Because It Stops

John Berger
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Photography, Because It Stops The Flow Of Life, Is Always Flirting With Death.

Understanding the Quote: "photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with..."

This quote by John Berger reflects deeply on the theme of photography. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Photography, Flirting, Flow, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how John Berger interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About John Berger

John Berger is celebrated for insightful thoughts on photography and flirting. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Photography
Flirting
Flow
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The Opposite Of Love Is Not To Hate But To Separate. If Love And Hate Have Something In Common It Is Because, In Both Cases, Their Energy Is That Of Bringing And Holding Together
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What Do Drawings Mean To Me? I Really Don't Know. The Activity Absorbs Me. I Forget Everything Else In A Way That I Don't Think Happens With Any Other Activity.
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Nothing In The Nature Around Us Is Evil. This Needs To Be Repeated Since One Of The Human Ways Of Talking Oneself Into Inhuman Acts Is To Cite The Supposed Cruelty Of Nature.
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Compare The Cinema With Theatre. Both Are Dramatic Arts. Theatre Brings Actors Before A Public And Every Night During The Season They Re-enact The Same Drama. Deep In The Nature Of Theatre Is A Sense Of Ritual. The Cinema, By Contrast, Transports Its Audience Individually, Singly, Out Of The Theatre Towards The Unknown.
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To Remain Innocent May Also Be. To Remain Ignorant.
Ignorant
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I Use Charcoal A Lot. Partly Because It Has Such A Fantastic Range But Also Because It Is Very Easy To Erase. For Me, Drawing Is A Lot To Do With Taking Out, With Returning To The White Of The Paper.
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We Never Look At Just One Thing; We Are Always Looking At The Relation Between Things And Ourselves.
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We Who Draw Do So Not Only To Make Something Observed Visible To Others, But Also To Accompany Something Invisible To Its Incalculable Destination
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A Peasant Becomes Fond Of His Pig And Is Glad To Salt Away Its Pork. What Is Significant, And Is So Difficult For The Urban Stranger To Understand, Is That The Two Statements Are Connected By An And Not By A But.
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Capitalism Survives By Forcing The Majority, Whom It Exploits, To Define Their Own Interests As Narrowly As Possible. This Was Once Achieved By Extensive Deprivation. Today In The Developed Countries It Is Being Achieved By Imposing A False Standard Of What Is And What Is Not Desirable.
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A Man's Presence Suggests What He Is Capable Of Doing To You Or For You. By Contrast, A Woman's Presence... Defines What Can And Cannot Be Done To Her.
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Landscapes Can Be Deceptive. Sometimes A Landscape Seems To Be Less A Setting For The Life Of Its Inhabitants Than A Curtain Behind Which Their Struggles, Achievements And Accidents Takes Place. For Those Who Are Behind The Curtain, Landmarks Are No Longer Only Geographic But Also Biographical And Personal
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There's The Artist's Intimacy And Truthfulness To Himself, But An Equal Intimacy To The Other [the One Drawn]. Picasso Drawings Are Like That... The Rembrandts Are Like That. The Artist Who Most Often Did That Was Van Gogh.
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Between The Experience Of Living A Normal Life At This Moment On The Planet And The Public Narratives Being Offered To Give A Sense To That Life, The Empty Space, The Gap, Is Enormous.
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It Can Happen That A Book, Unlike Its Authors, Grows Younger As The Years Pass.
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What Distinguished Man From Animals Was The Human Capacity For Symbolic Thought, The Capacity Which Was Inseparable From The Development Of Language In Which Words Were Not Mere Signals, But Signifiers Of Something Other Than Themselves. Yet The First Symbols Were Animals. What Distinguished Men From Animals Was Born Of Their Relationship With Them.
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The Relation Between What We See And What We Know Is Never Settled. Each Evening We See The Sun Set. We Know That The Earth Is Turning Away From It. Yet The Knowledge, The Explanation, Never Quite Fits The Sight.
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Men Look At Women. Women Watch Themselves Being Looked At. This Determines Not Only Most Relations Between Men And Women But Also The Relation Of Women To Themselves. The Surveyor Of Woman In Herself Is Male: The Surveyed Female. Thus She Turns Herself Into An Object - And Most Particularly An Object Of Vision: A Sight.
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For The Artist, Drawing Is Discovery. And That Is Not Just A Slick Phrase; It Is Quite Literally True.
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The Essence Of Songs Is Neither Vocal Nor Cerebral But Organic. We Follow Songs In Order To Be Enclosed. We Find Ourselves Inside A Message. The Unsung, Impersonal World Remains Outside, On The Other Surface Of A Placenta. All Songs, Even When Their Content Or Rendering Is Strongly Masculine, Operate Maternally.
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One Of The Fundamental Reasons Why So Many Doctors Become Cynical And Disillusioned Is Precisely Because, When The Abstract Idealism Has Worn Thin, They Are Uncertain About The Value Of The Actual Lives Of The Patients They Are Treating. This Is Not Because They Are Callous Or Personally Inhuman: It Is Because They Live In And Accept A Society Which Is Incapable Of Knowing What A Human Life Is Worth.
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Today The Discredit Of Words Is Very Great. Most Of The Time The Media Transmit Lies. In The Face Of An Intolerable World, Words Appear To Change Very Little. State Power Has Become Congenitally Deaf, Which Is Why But The Editorialists Forget It Terrorists Are Reduced To Bombs And Hijacking.
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In The Modern World, In Which Thousands Of People Are Dying Every Hour As A Consequence Of Politics, No Writing Anywhere Can Begin To Be Credible Unless It Is Informed By Political Awareness And Principles. Writers Who Have Neither Product Utopian Trash.
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The Camera Relieves Us Of The Burden Of Memory.
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Men Look At Women. Women Watch Themselves Being Looked At.
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If The Public Photograph Contributes To A Memory, It Is To The Memory Of An Unknowable And Total Stranger.
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I Wanted To Write About Looking At The World, So It's More About Helping People, Or Persuading People, To See What Is Around Us; Both The Marvellous And The Terrible.
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Naked
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Italian
Space
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[o]ften Art Has Judged The Judges, Pleaded Revenge To The Innocent And Shown To The Future What The Past Suffered, So That It Has Never Been Forgotten. . . .
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Never Again Shall A Single Story Be Told As Though It Were The Only One.
Stories
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Impossible
Injustice
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Flirting
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Photography
Memories
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Interesting
Interest
Never Chain Your Dogs Together With Sausages. One Must Accustom One's Self To Be Bored.
Dog
Blessing
Self
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Artist
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Average
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Energy
Degrees
Appearance
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Paris, I Believe, Is A Man In His Twenties In Love With An Older Woman.
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Men
Cities
Hope Is A Contraband Passed From Hand To Hand And Story To Story.
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Your Lips, Beloved, Are Like A Honeycomb: Honey And Milk Are Under The Tongue. And The Smell Of Your Clothes Is Like The Smell Of My Home.
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Smell
Clothes
Every Painted Image Of Something Is Also About The Absence Of The Real Thing. All Painting Is About The Presence Of Absence.
Real
Painting
Absence
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Language
Advertising
Every City Has A Sex And Age Which Have Nothing To Do With Demography.
Sex
Cities
Age
All Nationalisms Are At Heart Deeply Concerned With Names: With The Most Immaterial And Original Human Invention. Those Who Dismiss Names As A Detail Have Never Been Displaced; But The Peoples On The Peripheries Are Always Being Displaced. That Is Why They Insist Upon Their Continuity - Their Links With Their Dead And The Unborn.
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Names
Links
Glamour Cannot Exist Without Personal Social Envy Being A Common And Widespread Emotion. The Industrial Society ... Recognises Nothing Except The Power To Acquire ... No Other Kind Of Hope Or Satisfaction Or Pleasure Can Any Longer Be Envisaged Within The Culture Of Capitalism.
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Satisfaction
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Loss
Childhood
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Men
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Priorities
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Publicity
Nakedness Reveals Itself. Nudity Is Placed On Display. The Nude Is Condemned To Never Being Naked. Nudity Is A Form Of Dress.
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Dresses
Naked
Painting Is Something That You Need To Do, If Not Every Day, Then Certainly Most Days. It Is Almost Like Being A Pianist: If You Stop, You Lose Something.
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Painting
Pianist
The Animal Has Secrets Which, Unlike The Secrets Of Caves, Mountains, Seas Are Specifically Addressed To Man.
Animal
Men
Sea
The Strange Power Of Art Is Sometimes It Can Show That What People Have In Common Is More Urgent Than What Differentiates Them. It Seems To Me It's Something That Theatre Can Do, But It's Rare; It's Very Rare.
Art
People
Theatre
Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... All Believed In The Social Role Of Art... Their Works Were Like Hinged Doors, Connecting Activity With Activity. Art With Engineering; Music With Painting; Poetry With Design; Fine Art With Propaganda; Photographs With Typography; Diagrams With Action; The Studio With The Street.
Art
Doors
Engineering
When He Painted A Road, The Roadmakers Were There In His Imagination, When He Painted The Turned Earth Of A Ploughed Field, The Gesture Of The Blade Turning The Earth Was Included In His Own Act. Whenever He Looked He Saw The Labour Of Existence; And This Labour, Recognised As Such, Was What Constituted Reality For Him. (on Vincent Van Gogh)
Reality
Imagination
Earth
The Heart Of Paris Is Like Nothing So Much As The Unending Interior Of A House. Buildings Become Furniture, Courtyards Become Carpets And Arrases, The Streets Are Like Galleries, The Boulevards Conservatories. It Is A House, One Or Two Centuries Old, Rich, Bourgeois, Distinguished. The Only Way Of Going Out, Or Shutting The Door Behind You, Is To Leave The Centre.
Heart
Doors
Two
The Human Imagination... Has Great Difficulty In Living Strictly Within The Confines Of A Materialist Practice Or Philosophy. It Dreams, Like A Dog In Its Basket, Of Hares In The Open.
Dream
Dog
Philosophy
It Is Not Usually Possible In A Poem Or A Story To Make The Relationship Between Particular And Universal Fully Explicit. Those Who Try To Do So End Up Writing Parables.
Writing
Trying
Stories
Hair Is Associated With Sexual Power. With Passion. The Woman's Sexual Passion Needs To Be Minimized, So That The Spectator May Feel That He Has The Monopoly On Such Passion
Passion
Hair
Needs
'fahrenheit 9/11' Is Astounding. Not So Much As A Film - Although It Is Cunning And Moving - But As An Event.
Moving
Events
Film
If Every Event Which Occurred Could Be Given A Name, There Would Be No Need For Stories.
Names
Events
Would Be
That We Find A Crystal Or A Poppy Beautiful Means That We Are Less Alone, That We Are More Deeply Inserted Into Existence Than The Course Of A Single Life Would Lead Us To Believe.
Beautiful
Nature
Believe
At Times Failure Is Very Necessary For The Artist. It Reminds Him That Failure Is Not The Ultimate Disaster. And This Reminder Liberates Him From The Mean Fussing Of Perfectionism.
Mean
Artist
Perfection
Seeing Comes Before Words. The Child Looks And Recognizes Before It Can Speak.
Children
Looks
Speak
My Heart Born Naked Was Swaddled In Lullabies. Later Alone It Wore Poems For Clothes. Like A Shirt I Carried On My Back The Poetry I Had Read. So I Lived For Half A Century Until Wordlessly We Met. From My Shirt On The Back Of The Chair I Learn Tonight How Many Years Of Learning By Heart I Waited For You.
Heart
Years
Clothes
The Collaboration Which Sometimes Follows Is Seldom Based On Good Will: Usually On Desire, Rage, Fear, Pity Or Longing. The Modern Illusion Concerning Painting (which Post-modernism Has Done Nothing To Correct) Is That The Artist Is The Creator. Rather He Is A Reciever. What Seems Like Creaton Is The Act Of Giving Form To What He Has Recieved.
Artist
Giving
Desire
I Can't Tell You What Art Does And How It Does It, But I Know That Often Art Has Judged The Judges, Pleaded Revenge To The Innocent And Shown To The Future What The Past Suffered, So That It Has Never Been Forgotten. Art, When It Functions Like This, Becomes A Meeting-place Of The Invisible, The Irreducible, The Enduring, Guts, And Honor.
Art
Revenge
Past
The Poverty Of Our Century Is Unlike That Of Any Other. It Is Not, As Poverty Was Before, The Result Of Natural Scarcity, But Of A Set Of Priorities Imposed Upon The Rest Of The World By The Rich.
Priorities
Scarcity
World
Sometimes, Because Of Its Immediacy, Television Produces A Kind Of Electronic Parable. Berlin, For Instance, On The Day The Wall Was Opened. Rostropovich Was Playing His Cello By The Wall That No Longer Cast A Shadow, And A Million East Berliners Were Thronging To The West To Shop With An Allowance Given Them By West German Banks! At That Moment The Whole World Saw How Materialism Had Lost Its Awesome Historic Power And Become A Shopping List.
Wall
Shopping
Shadow
Autobiography Begins With A Sense Of Being Alone. It Is An Orphan Form.
Orphan
Form
Autobiography
Propaganda Requires A Permanent Network Of Communication So That It Can Systematically Stifle Reflection With Emotive Or Utopian Slogans. Its Pace Is Usually Fast.
Communication
Reflection
Pace
The Past Grows Gradually Around One, Like A Placenta For Dying.
Past
Dying
Grows
The True Content Of A Photograph Is Invisible, For It Derives From A Play, Not With Form, But With Time.
Play
Invisible
Photograph
You Painted A Naked Woman Because You Enjoyed Looking At Her, Put A Mirror In Her Hand And You Called The Painting “vanity,” Thus Morally Condemning The Woman Whose Nakedness You Had Depicted For You Own Pleasure.
Vanity
Mirrors
Hands
All Weddings Are Similar, But Every Marriage Is Different.
Marriage
Wedding
Different
Every Authentic Poem Contributes To The Labor Of Poetry... To Bring Together What Life Has Separated Or Violence Has Torn Apart... Poetry Can Repair No Loss, But It Defies The Space Which Separates. And It Does This By Its Continual Labor Of Reassembling What Has Been Scattered.
Loss
Space
Together
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