Top 35 Gordon Parks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit. Enthusiasm is natural; it is being alive, taking the initiative, seeing the importance of what you do, giving it dignity and making what you do important to yourself and to others.”

— Gordon Parks

2. “Enthusiasm is the electricity of life.”

— Gordon Parks

3. “Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.”

— Gordon Parks

4. “If you don’t have anything to say, your photographs aren’t going to say much.”

— Gordon Parks

5. “The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.”

— Gordon Parks

6. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”

— Gordon Parks

7. “I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.”

— Gordon Parks

8. “I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.”

— Gordon Parks

9. “Photography was my choice of weapons.”

— Gordon Parks

10. “I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.”

— Gordon Parks

11. “I’ve been asked if I think there will ever come a time when all people come together. I would like to think there will. All we can do is hope and dream and work toward that end. And that’s what I’ve tried to do all my life.”

— Gordon Parks

12. “If a man can reach the latter days of his life with his soul intact, he has mastered life.”

— Gordon Parks

13. “I do find a certain fascination with the unpredictable. The transitory years we wade through are what they are- what we make of them.”

— Gordon Parks

14. “You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show things that you like about the universe, things that you hate about the universe. It’s capable of doing both.”

— Gordon Parks

15. “Nothing came easy. I was just born with a need to explore every part of my mind. And with long searching and hard work, I became devoted to my restlessness.”

— Gordon Parks

16. “Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.”

— Gordon Parks

17. “The camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination, against poverty, against racism.”

— Gordon Parks

18. “At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.”

— Gordon Parks

19. “I think most people can do a whole lot more if they just try.”

— Gordon Parks

20. “I have been born again and again and each time, I have found something to love.”

— Gordon Parks

21. “I have never known anyone important enough to consume me in anger beyond a few hours. Better to depart their existence before they poison your own.”

— Gordon Parks

22. “I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.”

— Gordon Parks

23. “You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.”

— Gordon Parks

24. “Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.”

— Gordon Parks

25. “I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.”

— Gordon Parks

26. “I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn’t normally do for a young photographer just starting out.”

— Gordon Parks

27. “But I do feel a little teeny right now that I’m just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.”

— Gordon Parks

28. “I’ve been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.”

— Gordon Parks

29. “The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.”

— Gordon Parks

30. “Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life – being a painter, a poet or a photographer.”

— Gordon Parks

31. “I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil – along with the evil of racism – with a camera.”

— Gordon Parks

32. “The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can’t walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they’re really – the important people are the people he photographs.”

— Gordon Parks

33. “And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.”

— Gordon Parks

34. “Success can be wracking and reproachful, to you and those close to you. It can entangle you with legends that are consuming and all but impossible to live up to.”

— Gordon Parks

35. “I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.”

— Gordon Parks

36. “So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, ’41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.”

— Gordon Parks

37. “And now, I feel at 85, I really feel that I’m just ready to start.”

— Gordon Parks

38. “I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.”

— Gordon Parks