Top 90 Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

52. “We cannot develop and print a memory.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

53. “I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time united. Yes, yes, yes, yes!”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

54. “I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

55. “The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

57. “During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

58. “Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn’t go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

59. “In every photographer there is something of a stroller.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

61. “I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

62. “Photographier: c’est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l’oeil et le coeur.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

63. “Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

64. “The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

65. “Give me inspiration over information.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

67. “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. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

68. “This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

69. “For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

70. “Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one’s general culture. one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind one’s vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

72. “One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

73. “In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

74. “I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

75. “What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

76. “The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

77. “A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

78. “He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

79. “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

80. “Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

81. “Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

82. “It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

83. “In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

84. “The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

85. “It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there’s nothing left of truth.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

86. “Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

87. “One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one’s quarry; you don’t swish the water when you are fishing.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

88. “The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

89. “Human faces are such a world!”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

90. “Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing...”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

91. “There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

92. “For me photography is to place head and heart and eye along the same line of sight. It’s a way of life.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

93. “Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They’re quick things and there’s a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

94. “Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

95. “If there is one point, it’s humanity, it’s life, the richness of life. The thing is simply to be sensitive.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

— Henri Cartier-Bresson