Quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson

“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.”

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”

“We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.”

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”

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

“ How do you make your pictures? I dont know, its not important.”

“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balanc...”

“To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.To...”

“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have...”

“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" ...”

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”

“The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.”

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

“The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart. The objective of this joint operation is to depict the content of some event which is in the process of unfolding, ...”

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