Top 90 Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Featured in: Perseverance Quotes, Photography Quotes

2. “Life is once. Forever.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

4. “Of course it’s all luck.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

6. “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.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

7. “Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn’t hit fully until you’ve been in a place for a long time.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

8. “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

10. “Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Featured in: Intuition Quotes

11. “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.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

14. “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.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

15. “To take photographs is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

16. “Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

17. “As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

18. “Photography is nothing-it’s life that interests me.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

20. “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.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

21. “While we’re working, we must be conscious of what we’re doing.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

23. “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

24. “The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

25. “The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters – small, small differences – but it’s essential. I didn’t think there is such a big difference between photographers. Very little difference. But it is that little difference that counts, maybe.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

26. “We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

27. “Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

$Henri Cartier-Bresson Quote: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”$

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

29. “Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

30. “Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

31. “Pictures should never be posed. They are ‘revealed’ so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

32. “Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation – everything except a stage set.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Featured in: Intuition Quotes

33. “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

34. “And no photographs taken with the aid of flash light, either, if only out of respect for the actual light – even when there isn’t any of it.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

36. “In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

$Henri Cartier-Bresson Quote: “Only a fraction of the camera’s possibilities interests me – the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.”$

37. “Only a fraction of the camera’s possibilities interests me – the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson