Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

Beautiful dreams -- if the world were more beautiful they would come true -- But the world is relentless and cruel -- people are -- they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.

I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

There is a reality -- so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That's what I'm trying to get down in photography.

Photography is my passion.

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.

If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you'd ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she'd say: He always treated me like a gentleman.

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.

When I make a picture, I make love.

All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.

Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.