Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

Human faces are such a world!

Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn't hit fully until you've been in a place for a long time.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.

And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect of the actual light—even when there isn't any of it.

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

It is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

...it is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room.

Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.

In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.

One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one's quarry; you don't swish the water when you are fishing.

It's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown.

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

Give me inspiration over information.

In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

We cannot develop and print a memory.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)

Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards - never while actually taking a photograph.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.

We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human being

Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time united. Yes, yes, yes, yes!

The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.

— How do you make your pictures? — I don’t know, it’s not important.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? ­

Your first 10, 000 photographs are your worst.