Joel Meyerowitz Quotes

#1. I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous act. The recognition and the acting on the recognition, depending on your equipment, is close to instantaneous.

Joel Meyerowitz

#2. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for over 160 million years.

Wolff, Becky

#3. Gentility is nothing but Ancient Riches.

George Herbert

#4. Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.

Joel Meyerowitz

#5. The question was asked, how can you be a mother and a congresswoman? I said, I have a brain, I have a uterus and they both work.

Patricia Schroeder

#6. To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

John O'Donohue

#7. One of the things I learned on the street was to trust life and to keep hands off of it, and that feeling continues in the rest of the works that I do, the portrait, the landscapes, or any interest that I have. Things are good enough as they are, there's no reason to tamper with them.

Joel Meyerowitz

#8. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

#9. Photography is about being exquisitely present.

Joel Meyerowitz

#10. It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren't good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.

Joel Meyerowitz

#11. You look at it [a photograph] and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.

Joel Meyerowitz

#12. The thought for us [street photographers] was always: How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant? And, Could we really make it live as art? There was an almost moral dimension.

Joel Meyerowitz

#13. We are spending more as a percentage of our entire economy, almost 25 percent, than we have spent at any time since the end of World War II.

John Thune

#14. We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.

Joel Meyerowitz

#15. I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.

Joel Meyerowitz

#16. A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'

Joel Meyerowitz

#17. [The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy ... The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation.

Joel Meyerowitz

#18. My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it

Friedrich Nietzsche

#19. Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.

Joel Meyerowitz

#20. Learn everything you possibly can, and you will discover later that none of it was superfluous.

Hugh Of Saint-Victor

#21. The veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin

Karin Tansek

#22. To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#23. On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters - words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.

Alan Alda

#24. Personally, I've never done things just for money.

Glenn Turner

#25. Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures.

Joel Meyerowitz

#26. It may sound funny, but I got a thrill when I was pulled into a crowd once. It was like 'How am I going to get out of this?!

Nick Carter

#27. He sighed and looked about him. 'This is no world for men,' he said. 'And yet in a way ... it appeals.

H.G.Wells

#28. Never, never, never, hire people with an attitude. You will regret it.

Omar Hamoui

#29. The foolish undertake a trifling act, and soon desist, discouraged; wise men engage in mighty works, and persevere.

Magha