Henri Quotes

Through discipline, discipline is the other side of discipleship. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to have discipline.

That is our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

Precisely where I feel my poverty is where I discover God's blessing.

Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.

[The Return of the Prodigal book] came out of my emotional and spiritual journey during the four months I was gone from Daybreak because of depression.

If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.

Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.

People who pray stand receptive before the world. They no longer grab but caress, they no longer bite but kiss, they no longer examine but admire.

It is to this silence [contemplative prayer] that we all are called.

Experiment is the sole source of truth.

It is not order only, but unexpected order, that has value.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

The subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self. It knows how to choose and to divine.

In one word, to draw the rule from experience, one must generalize; this is a necessity that imposes itself on the most circumspect observer.

[T]he different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition [G]eometry is not true, it is advantageous.

When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks.

It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.

Need we add that mathematicians themselves are not infallible?

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.

Literature is the daughter of heaven, who descended upon earth to soften and charm all human ills.

Patience is the courage of virtue.

If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.

La solitude re tablit aussi bien les harmonies du corps que celles de l'a" me. Solitude restores the harmonies of the body no less than those of the soul.

Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.

One shouldn’t be only two photographers but thousands.

For Christians, the first of books is the Gospel and the Rosary is actually the abridgement of the Gospel.

Knowledge of anatomy is a tool like good brushes.

If the artist's will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.

The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy.

Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.

A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, “How did I do it?

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.

The big painter is one who has something to say. He thus does not paint men, landscape or furniture, but an idea.

Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.

We make our discoveries while in the state [of high functioning] because then we are clear-sighted.

In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.

The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea

Renoir had not only a great interest in human character, in human feeling, but had also a great love for the people he painted.

There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.

Self-education only produces expressions of self.

Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.

All education must be self-education.