Creativity Quote by John Berger

The line lands like a joke and lingers like a reprimand. “Never chain your dogs together with sausages” is Berger’s wicked little parable about incentives: if you bind yourself (or others) with the very thing that’s supposed to motivate, you don’t get discipline, you get frenzy. Sausages don’t stabilize dogs; they turn the chain into a moving target, a tug-of-war powered by appetite. In cultural terms, it’s a warning about the modern habit of engineering attention through treats: rewards masquerading as structure, stimulation marketed as purpose.

Then comes the pivot: “One must accustom one’s self to be bored.” Berger isn’t romanticizing misery; he’s defending a neglected capacity. Boredom here is not emptiness but the clearing where looking becomes possible. As an artist, Berger knew that perception requires time unfilled by constant bait. The subtext is almost moral: if you can’t tolerate the flat, unglamorous stretches of experience, you’ll keep outsourcing your will to whatever offers the next hit of pleasure, novelty, or validation.

Contextually, Berger’s broader work is preoccupied with how capitalism scripts desire and how images colonize our inner life. This aphorism reads like an antidote to the attention economy before the attention economy had a name: don’t let your commitments be tethered to rewards, and don’t confuse agitation with vitality. The wit makes the medicine go down, but the diagnosis is sharp: a culture trained to chase sausages will struggle to make anything that isn’t immediately edible.