Robert Adams Quotes

Combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

When you abide in the I you're abiding in the ego. The I is really the ego, the small I. It turns into the Self eventually.

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best - have educated themselves.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have.

History does not unfold: it piles up.

The secret to peace-of-mind is to not identify with anything other than your true self.

I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This gives you a clue.

Let go of the thoughts,
let go of the mind,
let go of everything.
Let go!
Drop it!
Drop everything.
Hold onto nothing.

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

Art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.

There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.

A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything

Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

The only burden you have ever had is your mind.

There is only one decision you need to make: You are either working at your Freedom or you are accepting your bondage.

All land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.

You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time.

We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.

Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence.

Our universe is a sea of energy - free, clean energy. It is all out there waiting for us to set sail upon it.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.

The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.

It's in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works.

Within You is the Light of a Thousand Suns. - Within You is Unimaginable Beauty.

Do not look for signs.
Do not look for experiences.
Do not be so complicated.
Become like a child.
See everything with awe.

Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.

Darkroom work had, after all, never interested me except as a means to an end; the place I wanted to be was outside in the light.