Quotes from Henri Cartier-Bresson

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

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

Human faces are such a world!

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

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

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.

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

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

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.

Life is once. Forever.

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.

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

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.

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

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.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.