Interior at Nice (c. 1919) by Henri Matisse - Poster

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”