Poster of Carmen Gaudin (1885) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“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.”

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

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

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

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

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

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

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

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

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

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

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”