Photography Quotes

Leap into the boundless and make it your home! Chuang - Tzu

Mysteriously, wonderfully, I bid farewell to what goes, I greet what comes; for what comes cannot be denied, and what goes cannot be detained. Chuang - Tzu

I photograph to see what things look like photographed. Garry Winogrand

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you…while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. - John Muir

“My best work is almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.” - Sam Abell

“Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.” - John Muir

“Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

“To take photographs means to recognize-simultaneously and within a fraction of a second-both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

“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.” -Henri Cartier-Bresson

“When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.” -Ansel Adams

“One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it…If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.” -Galen Rowell

a photograph can at once be completely literal (as in some sense it must be) and yet entirely ambiguous -Eric Fredine

a mind too active is no mind at all - Theodore Roethke

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.” - Susan Sontag

“In fact, when I am out searching, I never have a set idea of what it is I’m looking for. I simply seek, occasionally finding exactly what it was I wasn’t seeking.” - Jeff T. Alu

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” -Elliott Erwitt

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty” - Albert Einstein

“Never forget that all the great photographs in history were made with more primitive camera equipment than you currently own.” - Brooks Jensen

“The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” - Aldo Leopold

“I was so much older then, I am much younger now.” –Bob Dylan

“Adventure is not outside man, it is within.” - George Eliot

“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot