Henri Matisse Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.

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

Nothing can be accomplished without love.

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

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.

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

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.

My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.

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

I never retouch a sketch: I take a canvas the same size, as I may change the composition somewhat. But I always strive to give the same feeling, while carrying it on further.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

A certain blue enters your soul

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

I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

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.

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

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

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

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.

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.

Art is an escape from reality.

Creation begins with vision.

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

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

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Another word for creativity is courage.

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

Cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

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

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.

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

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

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