Odalisque, half-length (1923) by Henri Matisse - Poster

“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.”

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

“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.”

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

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

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

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

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