Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity.

What makes Steve [Jobs'] methodology different from everyone else's is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. He's a minimalist.

What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.

The idea of taking what's useful and discarding the rest is something I say to myself almost on a daily basis.

I don't put the focus on things that don't matter.

Most people in business and within their personal lives move towards complexity. More To Dos. More projects. More products. More meetings. More possessions. More goals. The best - I suggest to you - move in the opposite direction.

Knowing what to take out and what to leave in is what separates the men from the boys.

... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.

Keep the best, forget the rest.

There is but one art, to omit.

There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination.

There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.

Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things.

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

I think of choosing as a... both a fun and an effortful activity and I think of choice as something that in order for you to really get what you want out of it you have to put a lot into it and so I'm only willing to do that for a few different things and for the rest I really just try to either satisfy, come up with a simple rule or let somebody else make the choice.

...everything looks worse in black and white.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

Great writers know what to cut out. It's the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.

A simple life is not seeing how little we can get by with-that's poverty-but how efficiently we can put first things first. . . . When you're clear about your purpose and your priorities, you can painlessly discard whatever does not support these, whether it's clutter in your cabinets or commitments on your calendar. (148)

Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

The answer is, of course, to simplify, to prioritize, and in some cases, to use a well-known phrase, "Just say no!" But actually doing it may prove to be one of the real challenges in our complicated, overheated lives.

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

Most of what we say and do is unnecessary: remove the superfluity, and you will have more time and less bother. So in every case one should prompt oneself: 'Is this, or is it not, something necessary?' And the removal of the unnecessary should apply not only to actions but to thoughts also: then no redundant actions either will follow.