Robert Adams Quotes

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

The only burden you have ever had is your mind.

Dive into your heart center. Sit in the silence. Desire self-realization with all your heart, with all your mind, and all your soul. Everything will take care of itself.

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

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.

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

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

You've always been free. You've always been bright and shining. Everything else is just nonsense.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

Again the important point to remember is that you should keep asking yourself questions. Do not make statements. Ask questions to yourself. The mind hates that.

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.

The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day.

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

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.

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

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

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.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.

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

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.

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

A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything

History does not unfold: it piles up.

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

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

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?

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

There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it.

Almost all photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they'd hoped to share is something few want to receive.

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

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

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

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

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

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

Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious.

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

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

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.