Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination.

A system is in equilibrium when the forces constituting it are arranged in such a way as to compensate each other, like the two weights pulling at the arms of a pair of scales.

When the thing observed... is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning and the whole becomes unrecognizable. This is often true of snapshots in which no pattern of salient shapes organizes the mass of vague and complex nuances.

Since mechanically obtained randomness contains all kinds of possible permutations, including the most regular ones, it cannot be relied upon always to exhibit a pervasive irregularity.

Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.

The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.