Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment.

Nature obliges everything to change about. One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age; Another grows in its place from a negligible start. So time alters the whole nature of the world And earth passes from one state to another.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

Stability is not the way of the world.

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

Trying to catch hold of yourself is a fool's errand. There is no you, only a series of former yous, created in one instant, deleted in the next.

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.

Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be.

No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.

Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

How much can come And much can go, And yet abide the world!

Everything changes, even stone.

There is nothing constant in the universe. All ebb and flow, and every shape that's born, bears in its womb the seeds of change.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.

What's extreme today will not be extreme tomorrow.

All Things Change (Omnium Rerum Vicissitudo)

Everything changes every day.

It's very easy to think that the way things are is the way things will stay, and life just isn't like that.

Every moment there is creation, every moment destruction. There is no absolute creation, no absolute destruction. Both are movement, and that is eternal.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.