Henri Matisse Nude with Necklace and Long Hair poster (1920)

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

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

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

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

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

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