Henri Rousseau Quotes
When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself "Yes indeed, all that belongs to me!"
We are the two great painters of this era; you are in the Egyptian style, I in themodern style. (to Pablo Picasso)
The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying "this is mine" and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.
The interest and the feelings are not due to colors; the lines of a painting that move us move us even more in a print.
Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.
Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.
I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.
The happiest is he who suffers the least pain; the most miserable, he who enjoys the least pleasure.
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct.
The severity of penalties is only a vain resource, invented by little minds in order to substitute terror for that respect which they have no means of obtaining.
