Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

The camera is more than a recorder, it's a microscope. It penetrates, it goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

We need silence to be able to touch souls.

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverance for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

I am interested in silences

How rare it is to find a soul quiet enough to hear God speak.

Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking

To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page.

The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.

How can you expect God to speak in that gentle and inward voice which melts the soul, when you are making so much noise with your rapid reflections? Be silent and God will speak again.

Let us allow ourselves to be 'infected' by St. Joseph's silence! We need it greatly, in a world that is often too noisy, that does not favor meditation or listening to the voice of God.

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence; in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near

In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.

We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.

Silence is the Sabbath of the soul. Therein we rest, and therein we hear everything.

Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.

There is a way to master silence Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners And listen to the hiss of time outside

It wasn't a dance, but the complete absence of noise and movement, the silence, that brought me in contact with myself.

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.