“Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.”

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Wealth can also be that attitude of gratitude with which we remind ourselves everyday to count our blessings.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.

The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.

If they don’t appreciate your presence, they may never recognize your absence.

Appreciate what you’ve got and follow your heart and you’re all good. Don’t over-complicate things.

Appreciate again and again, freshly and naively the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stable these experiences may have become to others.

You’re an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I’m an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I’m in an ideal position to appreciate it.

Be nice to everyone, always smile, and appreciate things because it could all be gone tomorrow.