Rue des Moulins (1894) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec poster

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

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

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

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

“One must be absolutely modern.”

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

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

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

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

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

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

“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.”