Henri Matisse Quotes - Page 2

Exactitude is not truth.

My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.

He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back.

Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.

Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.

We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.

There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.

Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.

Work cures everything.

In love, the one who runs away is the winner.

When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.