Henri Matisse Quotes

Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

Another word for creativity is courage.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.

Nothing can be accomplished without love.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

Art is an escape from reality.

The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

Creation begins with vision.

Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base... He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day's work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us.

I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.

A certain blue enters your soul

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.

My curves are not crazy.

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.