Matisse: La Nageuse dans l’Aquarium, 1946 - Art print

“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.”

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

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

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

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

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

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