Henri Matisse
Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.Collection: Art
What I dream of is an art of balance.Collection: Dream
Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.Collection: Mean
A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to gain greater stability.Collection: Character
All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Thinking
...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.Collection: Art
For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.Collection: Influence
A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Children
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.Collection: Color
There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.Collection: Beauty
Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.Collection: Artist
With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.Collection: Simplicity
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.Collection: Views
Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.Collection: Two
My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.Collection: Color
To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.Collection: Courage
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 colourCollection: Organization
Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.Collection: Color
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.Collection: God
A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.Collection: Blue
What I am after, above all, is expression.Collection: Expression
The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.Collection: Inspirational
An artist is an explorer.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Dream
The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to.Collection: Stronger
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.Collection: Art
It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.Collection: Beautiful
My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.Collection: Color
Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.Collection: Simple
I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.Collection: Eye
Never ruin a good painting with the truth.Collection: Ruins
The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.Collection: Intuition
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.Collection: Beauty
When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.Collection: Inspirational
There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.Collection: Essence
A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Courage
When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.Collection: Creative
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.Collection: Art
If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.Collection: Color
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.Collection: Happiness
To arrive is to be in prison.Collection: Prison
...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.Collection: Art
I simply try to put down colors which render my sensationCollection: Color
It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone elseCollection: Paint