Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

A photograph is a moment - when you press the button, it will never come back.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

What came is gone forever every time

One must console oneself with the thought that time has a sieve through which most of these important things run into the ocean of oblivion and what remains after this selection is often still trite and bad.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

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.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Time destroys everything.

Time is not kind to everything.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Time is the devourer of all things.

Time is death.