Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.

You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Withdraw into yourself and look.

Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

When I open my eyes to the outer world I feel myself as a drop in the sea. But when I close my eyes and look within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?

I know I have within myself... a side of solitude. I think people who know me can see, but people who just meet me can't because I'm generally very fun and gregarious. I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going. I always felt that that was his kind of form of escape, in a way.

No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you'll never see reflected what's inside.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.

I'm my own biggest critic. I'm the one who has to go home and look at myself in the mirror.

Take some time each day to bring clarity to your inner world.

Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.

Inner Nature, when relied on, cannot be fooled. But many people do not look at it or listen to it, and consequently do not understand themselves very much. Having little understanding of themselves, they have little respect for themselves, and are therefore easily influenced by others.

I admit that I ain't no angel, I admit that I ain't no saint - I'm selfish and I'm cruel and I'm blind. If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. When they leave they're so hard to find.

I don't want to take myself too seriously. That's my lesson to myself.

The more you look into and understand yourself, the less judgmental you become towards others.

Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.

Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.

I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here.

The outer world is a reflection of our inner selves.

The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.