Henri Quotes

The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Remember the coffin where men All must to dust be returning.

Life is the flash in black heavens.

Love life's weariness leavens.

In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems.

How can I defend myself against what I want?

God tempers the cold to the shorn sheep.

But one always returns to one's first loves. [Fr., Mais on revient toujours A ses premieres amours.]

Order is man's greatest need, and his true well-being.

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.

Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.

Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.

The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

Every life is a profession of faith.

The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.

When everything has its proper place in our minds, we are able to stand in equilibrium with the rest of the world.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.

Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us.

Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.

Faith is certitude without proofs ... Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction.

Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so.

Truth above all, even when it upsets us and overwhelms us.

Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine.

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

Joy is the vital air of the soul.

Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.

We only understand that which already is within us.

About Jesus we must believe no one but himself.

At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul - HOPE

Knowledge, love, power-there is the complete life.

If man was what he ought to be, he would be adored by the animals.

Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love.

There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.