“What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.”

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.

The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.

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.