Henri Matisse White Plumes poster (1919)

“One must be absolutely modern.”

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

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

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

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

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

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

“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.”

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

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

“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.”

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