Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

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

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis

I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.

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

Give me inspiration over information.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

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

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

Life is once. Forever.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.

Human faces are such a world!

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.