Friedrich Nietzsche
[Philosopher, b. 1844, Rocken, Prussia, d. 1900, Weimar, Germany.]
Artists should not see things as they are: they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: To this end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives.
(Copied by Edward Weston in his quotation file.) 
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Over and over again the photographer walks a few steps and peers, rather comically, into the camera; to the exasperation of family and friends, he inventories what seems an endless number of angles; he explains, if asked, that he is trying for effective composition, but hesitates to define it. What he means is that a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matter... and by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Museums have a wonderful function, but there comes a time when the artist had better stay out of them, I think.
Christopher Isherwood
[b. 1904, Disley, Cheshire, England, d. 1986, Santa Monica, California.]
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording—not thinking... Someday all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]
Every individual who launches his happiness on this stream [of photography] finds currents and rocks not laid down in the chart. Every sanguine little couple who set up a glass-house at the commencement of summer, call their friends about them, and toil alternately in broiling light and stifling gloom, have said before long, in their hearts, “Photography, thy name is disappointment!”
(1857)
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
The photographer, the artist, “takes” a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or that composition... [He] has rendered his object in some way transcendent and... in each instance his vision has penetrating validity.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.
