Explore Quotes by Henri Matisse

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

After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.

Work cures everything.

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

Creation begins with vision.

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

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.

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 arrive is to be in prison.

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.

Nothing can be accomplished without love.

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

Another word for creativity is courage.