Henri Quotes

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion.

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

It is not what he had, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.

Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one's self; order is power.

Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium

Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.

Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.

A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.

Order is a great person's need and their true well being.

Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

International institutions ought to be, as the national ones in democratic countries, established by the peoples and for the peoples

What I am after, above all, is expression.

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces.

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.

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

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.

The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

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.

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.

I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.

I was driven on by.. A force which I see today as something alien to my normal life... so I have been no more than a medium as it were.

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life.

What matters most to me? To work with my model until I have it enough in me to be able to improvise, to let my hand run free.

The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.

Fit the parts together, one into the other, and build your figure like a carpenter builds a house. Everything must be constructed, composed of parts that make a whole.

Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive.

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

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

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

It's good to have a prayer on your lips wherever you go.

Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.

It is very hard to stay in touch with our true identity because those who want our money, our time, and our energy profit more from our insecurity and fears than from our inner freedom.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.