Poster of Jane Avril (1899) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“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.”

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

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”