Best Robert Adams Quotes & Sayings

The secret to peace-of-mind is to not identify with anything other than your true self. — Robert Adams

There is only one I actually. That I is Consciousness. When you follow the personal I to the source, it turns into the universal I, which is Consciousness. Begin to catch yourself. begin to realize your divine nature. You do this by keeping quiet. The fastest way to realization is to keep quiet. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things). — Robert Adams

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute. — Robert Adams

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

Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue - why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks? — Robert Adams

Happiness is your True Nature.
Within you is Unimaginable Beauty.
Your True Self is Bright and Shining this Moment.
Through the clear Realization of the Truth,
your Real Self will come shining through. — Robert Adams

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

Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile? — Robert Adams

I think [Robert E.] Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man, had a good character, and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm. — Henry Adams

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life. — Robert Adams

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

All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly. — Robert Adams

For most people to be happy, there has to be a person, place, or thing involved in their happiness. In true happiness, there are no things involved. It's a natural state. You will abide in that state forever. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect
a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known. — Robert Adams

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

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper's painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper's vision we see more. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

Those of us who are working with these strange substances trying to find the best way of using them, both in the treatment of illnesses and for the exploration of the human mind, need men like Bishop to come forward and explain that our purposes are serious and good, to emphasize that this is not a diversion, an amusement or an attempt to relieve people of their spare cash.

-Robert Dickins — Cameron Adams

Nature photography ... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves. — Robert Adams

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? — Robert Adams

A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything — Robert Adams

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

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community. — Robert Adams

Never pray to God for release of your problems. Never pray to God to change your life, and to give you something better. This is wrong prayer. If you have to pray to God, pray to God to give you the strength and the wisdom and the courage that you need to be able to handle the situation that you're in. This is correct prayer. — Robert Adams

Don't pick up hitchhikers!"- D. Adams — Robert Lynn Asprin

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

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator. — Robert Adams

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

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

I want to let you in on a little secret. There are no problems. There are no problems. There never were any problems, there are no problems today, and there will never be any problems. Problems just mean that the world isn't turning the way you want it to. But in truth, there are no problems. Everything is unfolding as it should. Everything is right. You have to forget about yourself and expand your consciousness until you become the whole universe. The Reality in back of the universe is Pure Awareness. It has no problems. And you are That. — Robert Adams

You don't have to set aside a time for meditation. You can do it while you're driving your car,while you're at work, while you're playing music. Just be aware of yourself, of who you really are,and realize the rest is a projection of your mind. — Robert Adams

Little wonder that we ... find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom. — Robert Adams

The highest truth is to delete, not to add. To get rid of the things you believe in now. So empty yourself out totally and completely. All of your ideas, your feelings, all have to be emptied out of you. When you become totally and completely empty there is nothing you have to do to fill it up again. Emptiness is realization. Emptiness is Brahman. Emptiness is the Self. Emptiness is your real nature. — Robert Adams

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

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