Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret (1892) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec poster

“Art is born of constraints, lives of struggles, and dies of freedom.”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“Art hovers around the truth, but with the firm intention not to burn itself.”

“One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.”

“Beauty is always strange. I do not mean that it is deliberately, coldly strange, for in that case it would be a monster off the rails of life. I say that it always contains a little strangeness, a naive strangeness.”

“If the world were clear, art would not be.”

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

“Sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures which master one's sight. They flood one's consciousness.”

“Art is the reflection that the dazzled human soul gives back of the splendor of the beautiful.”

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”

“Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to one another.”

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

“Tears fall in my heart as rain falls on the town.”

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”