Top 160 Henri Matisse Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.”

— Henri Matisse

52. “With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”

— Henri Matisse

53. “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.”

— Henri Matisse

54. “Never ruin a good painting with the truth.”

— Henri Matisse

55. “Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses.”

— Henri Matisse

56. “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.”

— Henri Matisse

57. “A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter...”

— Henri Matisse

58. “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.”

— Henri Matisse

59. “Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.”

— Henri Matisse

60. “Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.”

— Henri Matisse

61. “I am made of all that I have seen.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

63. “Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.”

— Henri Matisse

64. “I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.”

— Henri Matisse

65. “A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.”

— Henri Matisse

66. “I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

68. “When a painting is finished, it’s like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.”

— Henri Matisse

69. “What’s so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn’t understand. A painter doesn’t see everything that he has put in his painting.”

— Henri Matisse

70. “One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.”

— Henri Matisse

71. “A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.”

— Henri Matisse

72. “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.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

75. “The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

77. “Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.”

— Henri Matisse

78. “Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.”

— Henri Matisse

79. “Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.”

— Henri Matisse

80. “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.”

— Henri Matisse

81. “What I am after, above all, is expression.”

— Henri Matisse

82. “Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.”

— Henri Matisse

83. “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.”

— Henri Matisse

84. “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”

— Henri Matisse

85. “A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.”

— Henri Matisse

86. “I’m growing old, I delight in the past.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

88. “An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.”

— Henri Matisse

89. “Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?”

— Henri Matisse

90. “To arrive is to be in prison.”

— Henri Matisse

91. “A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn’t so much the worse for you.”

— Henri Matisse

92. “The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

94. “The model for me is a touchstone, it is a door which I must break open in order to reach the garden in which I am alone and feel good, even the model exists only for what use I can make of it.”

— Henri Matisse

95. “Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.”

— Henri Matisse

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

— Henri Matisse

97. “Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.”

— Henri Matisse

98. “The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to...”

— Henri Matisse

99. “Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions, I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format.”

— Henri Matisse

100. “I shan’t get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.”

— Henri Matisse