Quote

The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.

Robert Adams

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Robert Adams
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Photographer
Orange
New Jersey
Robert Hickman Adams
Robert ii Adams
Flies
Photography
Snakes
Labor
Enjoyment
Rocks
Absurd
Balance
Scrambling
View
Investment
Rationally
Views
Keeps
Risking
Understand
Otherwise
Balances
Thing
Commitment

More quotes by Robert Adams

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Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.
Robert Adams
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Never try to stop the thoughts. If you try to stop the thoughts they will become bigger and greater and they will win. Because the mind appears to be very powerful. Yet in reality the mind does not exist. There is no mind. There is no such thing as a mind. So when you sit in the silence you observe, you watch, you become the witness.
Robert Adams
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The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
Robert Adams
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Of all the sacred places on the coast, none is more comforting than where rivers join the sea. By the river's disappearance we are reminded of life's passing, while by the ocean's beauty we accept it, in a hope we cannot explain.
Robert Adams
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Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear: the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.
Robert Adams
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There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.
Robert Adams
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The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.
Robert Adams
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. . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.
Robert Adams
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You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time.
Robert Adams
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I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This gives you a clue.
Robert Adams
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Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good — suggestive of more than just what it is — it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.
Robert Adams
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Do not look for signs. Do not look for experiences. Do not be so complicated. Become like a child. See everything with awe.
Robert Adams
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You are the Self, that perfect immutable Self. Nothing else exists. Nothing else ever existed. Nothing else will ever exist. There is only one Self and you are That. Rejoice!
Robert Adams
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The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.
Robert Adams
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Only when you can understand yourself as All Pervading Consciousness can you possibly understand that all the universe is an emanation of your mind. Everything that you see comes out of you.
Robert Adams
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...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world.
Robert Adams
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Let go of the thoughts, let go of the mind, let go of everything. Let go! Drop it! Drop everything. Hold onto nothing.
Robert Adams
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There's something within you that knows what to do. There is a power greater than you that knows how to take care of you without your help. All you've got to do is to surrender to it. Surrender your thoughts, your mind, your ego, to the current that knows the way. It will take care of you. It will take better care of you than you can ever imagine.
Robert Adams
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There is only one decision you need to make: You are either working at your Freedom or you are accepting your bondage.
Robert Adams
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Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
Robert Adams