“Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.

A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.

We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.

Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.