It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.
Walker EvansRead
Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is short and filled with opportunities to learn; take them while you can.
This quote by Walker Evans underscores the ephemeral nature of life and the importance of being observant and curious. It suggests that one should actively engage with the world—through observation and inquiry—in order to gain knowledge and experiences that enrich our brief existence.
Themes
KnowledgeLifeCuriosityExperienceShort-Lived
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
More from Walker Evans
All quotes →That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
Walker EvansRead
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
Walker EvansRead
It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
Walker EvansRead
Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker EvansRead
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
Walker EvansRead
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To inquisitive minds like yours and mine the reflection that the quantity of human knowledge bears no proportion to the quantity of human ignorance must be in one view rather pleasing, viz., that though we are to live forever we may be continually amused and delighted with learning something new.
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...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.
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