Moroccan Landscape (Acanthus), 1912 by Henri Matisse – Poster

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

“Art is the premonition of truth.”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

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

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

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

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“Only children know what they are looking for.”

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

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”