50 Photography Quotes Sure to Inspire You

If you are waiting for inspiration to strike, you may end up waiting longer than you like. Actively seeking inspiration is often a more reliable way of stimulating your creativity. In the spirit of encouragement, we decided to collect these touching photography quotes, sure to pump you up and fill you with good vibes, regardless of which types of photography you prefer.

Scroll down to get your daily dose of inspiration.

“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
– Destin Sparks

“Photography is truth.”
– Jean-Luc Godard

“The Earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.”
– Yann Arthus-Bertrand

“Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop.”
– Ziad K. Abdelnour

“Unless you photograph what you love, you’re not going to make good art.”
– Sally Mann

“Photography is a love affair with life.”
– Burk Uzzle

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
– Susan Sontag

“Photography helps people to see.”
– Berenice Abbott

“Photography is a love affair with life.”
– Burk Uzzle

“While sitting on the bench and watching people walk by I noticed life happening around me. Picnics, reading, and gathering with friends and family. Capture these moments too.”
– Courtney Slazinik

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
– Alfred Stieglitz

“It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument”
– Ansel Adams

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
– Elliott Erwitt

“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second.”
– Salman Rushdie

“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
– Ernst Haas

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
– Ansel Adams

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Capturing the moments of today that will wow your hearts tomorrow.”
– Unknown

“To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs’, I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
– Ansel Adams

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”
– Ted Grant

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
– Karl Lagerfield

“Look, I’m not an intellectual – I just take pictures.”
– Helmut Newton

“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
– Ansel Adams

“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.”
– Bruno Barbey

“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely every hundredth of a second.”
– Mark Riboud

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
– Dorothea Lange

“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
– Diane Arbus

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
– Ansel Adams

“You just have to live and life will give you pictures.”
– Henri Cartier Bresson

“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
– Eudora Welty

“Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.”
– David Alan Harvey

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
– Diane Arbus

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
– John Lubbock

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
– Edgar Degas

“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
– Alfred Eisenstaedt

“You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.”
– Unknown

“If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event…what kind of film would you use?”
– Unknown

“A photograph is a click away. A good photograph is a thousand clicks away and a better one, a million clicks away.”
– Kowatham Kumar K

“The camera has always been a guide, and it’s allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn’t even notice.”
– Don Chadwick

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I am going to take tomorrow.”
– Imogen Cunningham

“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
– Steve McCurry

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
– Dorothea Lange

“No place is boring if you’ve had a full night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.”
– Robert Adams

“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
– Andy Warhol

“The only photographer you should compare yourself to is the one you used to be.”
– Unknown

“It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.”
– Paul Caponigro