French Photographer Quotes

Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Robert Doisneau
Matthieu Ricard
Willy Ronis

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there – even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau
From the vast expanses of its surface waters to its beaches and marshes and tidelands and mangrove swamps, from its many thousands of miles of rocky shores to its deepest and darkest abyss, the sea produces life in fantastic abundance.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure as he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.

Matthieu Ricard
Matthieu Ricard
AIDS was... an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life.

Most of my photographs were taken on the spur of the moment, very quickly, just as they occurred. All attention focuses on the specific instant, almost too good to be true, which can only vanish in the following one.

Willy Ronis
Willy Ronis
I have these obsessions that I do not completely understand, with the deep mark, with the ruptured surface, with scars and traces, traces that human beings are leaving on the earth. It is not a comment on the environment... it is metaphysical.