Le bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life) - (1905) by Henri Matisse - Poster

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

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

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

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

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

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

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

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

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

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

“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.”

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