Henri Matisse White Plumes poster (1919)

“One must be absolutely modern.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

“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.”

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”