Decisive Moments Quotes

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

I have started to think that the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock.

Decisive moment: the one when you will be really alone. And it is perhaps this that makes her hesitate: not the void, but the vastness of the solitude. It's as well if you are frightened of solitude. It's a sign that you have come to the moment of your birth.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

World War II was a decisive time in our history and June 6, 1944, marked the decisive moment of the war.

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode - from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

I am courageous at the decisive moment. But I need a good deal of start-up time, and I try to take as much as possible into consideration beforehand.

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.

Photographs offer more than decisive moments. They are not alone, they add and subtract and change with time. They are metaphors for our lives... Even a static photograph can change in the blink of a day or decade.

All true competitors in any field and walk of life take adversity and are strengthened from it. They develop a reputation of determination and toughness that wins more decisive moments in life than winning shots. Bobby Blair was one tough player. Playing him was like going into a phone booth with an angry bobcat. His massive talent was only surpassed by his courage to hit the big shots under the most pressure. No one ever looked forward to playing him. It was going to be pain and suffering if you wanted to go the distance it took to beat him.

Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. The photographers eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it.

If bringing down the wall would require you to fly, you must believe you can fly. Otherwise, when the decisive moment comes, you will surely discover you ahve no wings.

In the decisive moment I won the victory over myself. I chose to live. And believe me, it takes courage to choose life under those circumstances.

One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Running makes you an athlete in all areas of life...trained in the basics, prepared for whatever comes, ready to fill each hour and deal with the decisive moment.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.

I'm a big fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who had that whole "decisive moment" approach to taking pictures, of having multiple elements line up within the frame.

This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.

Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.

The act of creation, making anything, is an alteration. We cannot eliminate the medium or ourselves from the process, and both are limited. We create decisive moments by devoting our time and attention to specific things. This is the greatest gift we can give anyone or anything - pieces of our life.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.

The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time.