57 Great Quotes On Ideas

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Ideas.
“Everything begins with an idea.” – Earl Nightingale
“Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.” – Jim Rohn
“To get a great idea, come up with lots of them.” — Thomas Edison
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” – Linus Pauling
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” – John Steinbeck
“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” — Edward de Bono
“No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered.” – Winston Churchill
“Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward: they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.” ― Max Planck
“You shouldn’t be a prisoner of your own ideas.” – Sol LeWitt
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes
“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.” – Roger von Oech
“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” ― Albert Einstein
“Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are just produced.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” – William James
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” ― John Cage
“The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time.” – Henry Ford
“When I am ….. completely myself, entirely alone… or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“When the ideas are coming, I don’t stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn’t come along all the time.” – Dr. Dre
“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” ― William Makepeace Thackeray
“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.” – Anais Nin
“Labor gives birth to ideas.” – Jim Rohn
“I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.” – Albert Einstein
“Ideas are the seeds, not the substance, of creativity.” — Michael Schrage
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” ― George Bernard Shaw
“The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?” – Dale Carnegie
“Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.”– Alfred North Whitehead
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca
“A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.” – Mary Kay Ash
“But the truth is, it’s not the idea, it’s never the idea, it’s always what you do with it.”― Neil Gaiman
“You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.” – Warren Buffet
“Money never starts an idea. It is always the idea that starts the money.” – Owen Laughlin
“After years of telling corporate citizens to ‘trust the system’, many companies must relearn instead to trust their people and encourage them to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“Capital isn’t that important in business. Experience isn’t that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas.” – Harvey Firestone
“Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.” – Sam Walton
“To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, requires a lot of discipline.” – Steve Jobs
“Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.” – Henry Ford
“If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.” – Thomas Mann
“Everyone is in love with their own ideas.” – Carl Jung
“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.” – Rollo May
“One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” – Ovid
“If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.” – Charles Kettering
“A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” ― John F. Kennedy
“You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.” – Medgar Evers
“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.” – Pablo Picasso
“Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.” – Thomas Edison
“With ideas it is like with dizzy heights you climb: At first they cause you discomfort and you are anxious to get down, distrustful of your own powers; but soon the remoteness of the turmoil of life and the inspiring influence of the altitude calm your blood; your step gets firm and sure and you begin to look – for dizzier heights.” – Nikola Tesla
“New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done; 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!” – Arthur C. Clarke
“An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” – Charles Dickens
“I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.” – Pablo Picasso
“An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.” – Don Marquis
“An idea is salvation by imagination.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” – Robin Williams
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”– Victor Hugo
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28 Great Quotes On Open-Mindedness

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Open-Mindedness.
“We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.” — John Cleese
“Minds are like parachutes — they only function when open.” — Thomas Dewar
“Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.” — Charles F. Kettering
“One change always leaves the door open for the establishment of others.” — Niccolo Machiavelli
“When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon the closed door that we don’t see the one which has opened for us.” — Alexander Graham Bell
“Creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people’s lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.” — Steven Covey
“One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It’s amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.” — Charles F. Kettering
“Without an open-minded mind, you can never be a great success.” – Martha Stewart
“I’m looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” — Henry Ford
“I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated, every action analyzed and every responsibility assigned by an organization chart.” — Akio Morita
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.” — Henry Bessemer
“Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.” – Rupert Sheldrake
“At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes–an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.” – Carl Sagan
“Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.” — Margaret Mead
“Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” — Thomas Huxley
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.” — Henry Bessemer
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.” – Niels Bohr
“If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that – then that will take you are far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.” – Pema Chodron
“If we open our hearts, we will also find open hearts – it is always mutual.” – Abbot Leo von Rudloff
“Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film.” – Ansel Adams
“An artist’s duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.” – Nick Cave
“The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.” – Herbie Hancock
“I’m someone who is open-minded to new experiences because they teach you new things.” – Marilyn Manson
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett
“Now there’s a man with an open mind — you can feel the breeze from here!” — Groucho Marx
“By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” – Richard Dawkins
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55 Great Quotes On Poetry

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Poetry.
“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.” – Christopher Fry
“Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.” – Carl Sandburg
“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” – Samuel Johnson
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” – Plato
“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” – John F. Kennedy
“The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse… the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” – Aristotle
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle
“Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature.” – Augustus William Hare
“Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.” – Georges Brague
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.” – Muriel Rukeyser
“Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” – James Branch Cabell
“I don’t create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.” – Edith Södergran
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” – Salvatore Quasimodo
“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.” – Edmund Burke
“Poetry is life distilled.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” – Thomas Gray
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost
“Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.” – Robinson Jeffers
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.” – Wallace Stevens
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” – Novalis
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Khalil Gibran
“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” – Jim Morrison
“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie
“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.” – Socrates
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” — Wallace Stevens
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” – Percy Shelley
“Poetry is an act of peace.” – Pablo Neruda
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“There is often as much poetry between the lines of a poem as in those lines.” – Alexandre Vinet
“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” – Stephen Mallarme
“The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” – Jean Cocteau
“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.” – Derek Walcott
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” – Robert Frost
“I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.” – Carl Sandburg
“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” – Randall Jarrell
“The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away.” – Alexandre Vinet
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen
“The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.” – Robert Penn Warren
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” – Robert Frost
“In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace…. All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world.” – Alexandre Vinet
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.” – John Keats
“Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” – James Tate
“I write poetry in order to live more fully.” – Judith Rodriguez
“If you’ve got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow.” – Terri Guillemets
“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire
“If you can’t be a poet, be the poem.” – David Carradine
“Every single soul is a poem.” – Michael Franti
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” – Muriel Rukeyser
“I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don’t have to write anymore.” – Tukaram
“God is the perfect poet.” – Robert Browning
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” – Paul Valéry
“Poetry is not always words.” – Terri Guillemets
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10 Quotes By Photographer Irving Penn

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Irving Penn.
“I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.” – Irving Penn
“A good photograph is one that communicate a fact, touches the heart, leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” – Irving Penn
“I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.” – Irving Penn
“A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.” – Irving Penn
“Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print.” – Irving Penn
“I’ve tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I’ve failed. I’ve tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can’t control. I’m really quite narrow, you know.” – Irving Penn
“Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world… Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.” – Irving Penn
“Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.” – Irving Penn
“What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.” – Irving Penn
“I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn’t go to it out of hunger.” – Irving Penn
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7 Quotes By Photographer Harold Edgerton

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Harold Edgerton.
“If you don’t wake up at three in the morning and want to do something, you’re wasting your time. ” – Harold Egerton
“When I was a boy, I read with great interest but skepticism about as magic lamp which was used with success by a certain Aladdin. Today I have no skepticism whatsoever about the magic of the xenon flash lamp which we use so effectively for many purposes.” – Harold Egerton
“The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late.” – Harold Eugene Edgerton
“We worked and worked, didn’t get anywhere. That’s how you know you’re doing research.” – Harold Egerton
“In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.” – Harold Egerton
“Don’t make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts.” – Harold Egerton
“Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.” – Harold Egerton
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18 Quotes By Photographer Edward Burtynsky

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Edward Burtynsky.
“[Taking good images] is about knowing oneself and trying to listen to that kind of intuitive forces that allow you to respond more positively to one image or to one subject over another and pay attention to that emotion and to follow that and also to be aware of it.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I think you learn about pictures in yourself … being true to things that you personally respond to and this is the only way you find your original voice, by following your own instinct.” – Edward Burtynsky
“You need to have an inquiring mind. You have to ask questions (…), not accept what is given, but say: “Why is it so?” And it is in that kind of asking that you begin to get behind some of the issues that allow the world appear the way it does. So if you just accept the world the way it is and don’t question it I can’t see how you can go far creatively.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Sometimes you don’t know why you’re doing something. You’re intuitively following, to see where it leads.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I wish my artwork could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability.” – Edward Burtynsky
“We come from the nature and we have to understand what it is, because we are conected to it and we are part of it. And if we destroy nature we destroy ourselves” – Edward Burtynsky
“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can’t.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I’m working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don’t see it as that simple a problem.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Industrial landscape – define us and our belonging to the planet.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Water, like many other resources, is harvested, transported and used throughout all aspects of society. Unlike other resources, water is critical to the survival of all forms of life. The underlying question that sits at the core of my exploration is to what degree can we shape water before it begins to shape us.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I think the environmental movement has failed in that it’s used the stick too much; it’s used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn’t sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out.” – Edward Burtynsky
“Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It’s a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I wish I could create an IMAX film that would make my work accessible to a broader audience.” – Edward Burtynsky
“I wish we could launch a ground-breaking competition that motivates kids to invent new ideas in sustainable living.” – Edward Burtynsky
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48 Great Quotes On Wonder

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Enjoy this collection on wonder.
“Wonder is the desire for knowledge.” – St. Thomas Aquinas
“As knowledge increases, wonder deepens.” – Charles Morgan
“Wisdom begins in wonder.” – Socrates
“What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.” – Ralph Sockman
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30 Great Quotes On Depth

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Depth.
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth” – Marilyn vos Savant
“You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth” – Henry Louis Mencken
“What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.” – Ezra Pound
”Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.” – C.G. Jung
“The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.” – Julien Green
“It’s our challenges and obstacles that give us layers of depth and make us interesting. Are they fun when they happen? No. But they are what make us unique. And that’s what I know for sure… I think.” – Ellen DeGeneres
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23 Quotes By Photographer Paul Strand

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Paul Strand.
“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand
“I’ve always wanted to be aware of what’s going on around me, and I’ve wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.” – Paul Strand
“Your photography is a record of your living – for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.” – Paul Strand
“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.” – Paul Strand
“The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cezannes, to the paintings of Van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to context, to the truth of the real world. It is the way he sees this world and translates it into art that determines whether the work of art becomes a new and active force within reality, to widen and transform man’s experience. The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand
“The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.” – Paul Strand
“The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.” – Paul Strand
“I go and get the camera and do it. Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice. A rock will probably always be more or less there juts the way you saw it yesterday. But other things change, they’re not always there the day after or the week after. Either you do it or you don’t. Certainly with things as changeable as shy and landscape with moving clouds and so on, if they look wonderful to you on a certain day and if you don’t do it then, you may never see them again for the rest of your life. So as a photographer you become very conscious – at least I do – that everything is in movement.” – Paul Strand
“The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.” – Paul Strand
“All good art is abstract in its structure.” – Paul Strand
“Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation…” – Paul Strand
“Honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of… the photographer… this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods…” – Paul Strand
“The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification, if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all comparison of potentialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. [emphasis added] Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization.” – Paul Strand
“Did I express my personality? I think that’s quite unimportant because it’s not people’s selves but what they have to say about life that’s important.” – Paul Strand
“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.” – Paul Strand
“No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.” – Paul Strand
“The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.” – Paul Strand
“The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal—it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.” – Paul Strand
“It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent––of his genius, if you will––is the richness he finds in such a life’s voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.” – Paul Strand
“And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.” – Paul Strand
“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand
“If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.” – Paul Strand
“Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.” – Paul Strand
“I think of myself as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.” – Paul Strand
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