Portrait of Madame Matisse (1905) by Henri Matisse: poster

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

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

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

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”