Brassai's Quotes

#1. When you meet the man [Brassai] you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes. And the sharpness of vision and depth of insight are revealed in Brassai's lifelong photographic exploration of Paris - its people, places, and things.

Henry Miller

#2. I've always believed that we were, each of us, put here for a reason, that there is a plan, somehow a divine plan for all of us. I know now that whatever days are left to me belong to him.

Ronald Reagan

#3. We photographers are nothing but a pack of crooks, thieves and voyeurs. We are to be found everywhere we are not wanted; we betray secrets that were never entrusted to us; we spy shamelessly on things that are not our business; And end up the hoarders of a vast quantity of stolen goods.

Brassai

#4. The precise instant of creation is when you choose the subject. (meaning that the essential thing occurs at the moment when he, the photographer, meets the reality he wishes to capture.

Brassai

#5. For me the criterion of a good photograph is that it is unforgettable.

Brassai

#6. Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do.

Brassai

#7. To keep from going stale you must forget your professional outlook and rediscover the virginal eye of the amateur.

Brassai

#8. Only powerfully conceived images have the ability to penetrate the memory, to stay there, in short to become unforgettable.

Brassai

#9. The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.

Brassai

#10. To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain.

Brassai

#11. A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

Brassai

#12. Beauty is not the purpose of creation, it is its reward. Its appearance, often late in the day, is no more than an indication that the disrupted equilibrium between man and nature has once again been restored by art. Submitted to this test, what remains of contemporary works of art?

Brassai

#13. I have hour spurts when I feel fine and I can walk normal and stuff, other hours, I'm wobbling. I feel like there's somebody behind me kicking my legs out from underneath me. The whole tumor symptom thing is crazy. It's unpredictable. It really messes with your life.

Lauryn Hill

#14. After twenty years you can begin to be sure of what camera will do.

Brassai

#15. Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed
it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#16. I think education and intelligence (are) important, but not art. Not artistic education ...

Brassai

#17. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.

A.E. Housman

#18. In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

Colin Wilson

#19. Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.

Brassai

#20. All we ask you to do is submit to it, and, if you scream or moan, to agree ahead of time that it will be in vain,

Pauline Reage

#21. There are many photographs which are full of life but
which are confusing and difficult to remember.
It is the force of an image which matters.

Brassai

#22. What attracts the photographer is precisely the chance to penetrate inside phenomena, to uncover forms ... He pursues them into their last refuges and surprises them at their most positive, their most material and true.

Brassai

#23. The wall, safe haven for what is forbidden, gives a voice to all those who would, without it, be condemned to silence

Brassai

#24. You ever loved somebody so much you can barely breathe when your with em

Marshall Mathers

#25. It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation.

Brassai

#26. Don't you hate when your hand falls asleep and you know it will be up all night.

Steven Wright

#27. Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.

Brassai

#28. Recovery challenges the established order and as such, is a 'great idea' along with the ideas of evolution or a 'round earth'; turning all our thinking upside down.

Laurie Davidson

#29. Do the choices I make line up with how I really want to live?

Tsh Oxenreider

#30. The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.

Brassai

#31. I got niggaz lookin' for Websters like George Papadopolis'

Ras Kass

#32. My ambition was always to show aspects of daily life as if we were seeing them for the first time.

Brassai

#33. Our fearless shall be our secret weapon

John Green

#34. In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.

Brassai

#35. I don't invent anything. I imagine everything ... most of the time, I have drawn my images from the daily life around me. I think that it is by capturing reality in the humblest, most sincere, most everyday way I can, that I can penetrate to the extraordinary.

Brassai

#36. If you take your inspiration from nature, you don't invent anything, because what you want to do is to interpret something. But still, everything passes throught your imagination. What you produce at the end is very different from the reality you started with.

Brassai