Robert Doisneau Quotes

• If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

  Robert Doisneau

  Photography, Knowing, Cameras

  107 Copy quote

• I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be.

  Robert Doisneau

  Photograph

  61 Copy quote

• The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

  Robert Doisneau

  Movie, Photography, Directors

  56 Copy quote

• A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure.

  Robert Doisneau

  Beautiful, Treasure, Photographer

  56 Copy quote

• Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly.

  Robert Doisneau

  Life Is Short, Kissing, Forgiving

  61 Copy quote

• To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

  Robert Doisneau

  Education, Photography

  33 Copy quote

• For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better.

  Robert Doisneau

  Years, Get Better, Firsts

  35 Copy quote

• If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.

  Robert Doisneau

  Photography, Writing, Answers

  30 Copy quote

• A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.

  Robert Doisneau

  Girl, Memories, Home

  34 Copy quote

• There are days when simply seeing feels like happiness itself....You feel so rich, the elation seems almost excessive and you want to share it

  Robert Doisneau

  Elation, Want, Rich

  35 Copy quote

• Some days the mere fact of seeing feels like perfect happiness... You feel so rich you long to share your jubilation with others. The memory of such moments is my most precious possession. Maybe because there've been so few of them. 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

  Memories, Two, Perfect

  Robert Doisneau (1980). “Photographs”

  36 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Two, Add

  Robert Doisneau (1980). “Photographs”

  29 Copy quote

• I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea.

  Robert Doisneau

  Ideas, Path, Stammering

  30 Copy quote

• When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

  Robert Doisneau

  Photography, People, Laughing

  18 Copy quote

• I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.

  Robert Doisneau

  Finishing It, Giving, Advice

  23 Copy quote

• You've got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts - a sort of intuitive medium - so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.

  Robert Doisneau

  Photography, Struggle, Animal

  30 Copy quote

• To freeze time, to hold on to youth, this business makes no sense.
  It's always time that wins in the end.

  Robert Doisneau

  Winning, Youth, Ends

  21 Copy quote

• Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

  Robert Doisneau

  Luck, Pay, Chance

  18 Copy quote

• Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.

  Robert Doisneau

  Photography, Lying, Made

  17 Copy quote

• The photographer must be absorbent - like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment... His technique should be like an animal function... he should act automatically.

  Robert Doisneau

  Animal, Technique, Photographer

  17 Copy quote

• I hate collectors, the ones who take something just for themselves.

  Robert Doisneau

  Hate, I Hate, Collectors

  17 Copy quote

• You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

  Robert Doisneau

  Ideas, Lines, Hunters

  14 Copy quote

• Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

  Robert Doisneau

  People, Imagination, Sophisticated

  12 Copy quote

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