Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

I'm always trying to figure out ways to keep hold of memories. My one-sentence journal, for instance.

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.

I have always had a great interest in visually documenting the past.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

People don't believe they've experienced the event unless they've taken a photograph.

Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time. And I think that ties back to what I learned watching my grandmother lose her memories is, you know, we are all facing erasure eventually.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.

Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.

Once you read something, you can't erase it from your brain.

The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

People are machines of forgetfulness

Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics; they can be lost forever.

When I was younger, I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I remember going down to the docks in San Francisco and asking a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees… and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

We cannot develop and print a memory.