Henri Matisse Quotes

Creativity takes courage.

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

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.

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.

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

Another word for creativity is courage.

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

I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.

...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

Nothing can be accomplished without love.

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

Exactitude is not truth.

I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

To arrive is to be in prison.

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day’s work, from illumination the fog that surround

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul

Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it." Henri Matisse

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium. — HENRI MATISSE

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

Without hard work, talent is not enough - Henri Matisse

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

When you're out of willpower, you can call on stubbornness.

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

Si je crois en Dieu? Oui, quand je travaille. Quand je suis soumis et modeste, je me sens tellement aidé par quelqu'un qui me fait faire des choses qui me surpassent.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

The French painter Henri Matisse once declared, “Grace is an inner atmosphere.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.

Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.‡ Even when I’m well I like to lie in bed and think. It’s as if

I am made of all that I have seen.

This is why journeys are useful, they enlarge the space that is around us.

Siempre hay flores para aquellos que desean verlas.

The artist 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.

Creativity takes courage

Rodin once said that a combination of extraordinary circumstances was needed for a man to live to 70 and to pursue with passion what he loves.

There are always flowers for those that seek them

El artista comienza con una visión, una operación creativa que requiere un esfuerzo. La creatividad requiere coraje.

Me gustaría recuperar esa frescura de visión que es característica de la extrema juventud, cuando todo el mundo es nuevo para ella.

..., que sólo quienes, como él, son sensibles a la alquimia del sonido y los sentidos, son capaces de transformar la realidad negativa de la vida en las formas substanciales y significativas del arte. Sólo quienes pueden admitir la luz en sus entrañas pueden expresar lo que hay en el corazón.

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

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

Creative takes courage -Henri Matisse

My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.

An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc." -Henri Matisse, artist (31 Dec 1869-1954)

Il y a des fleurs partout pour qui veut bien les voir.

Il y a toujours des fleurs pour ceux qui veulent les voir.

In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and the sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his dreams without feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of flying spray.

Creativity takes courage. " – Henri Matisse