Henri Quotes

A picture should be the expression of the will of the painter.

I am interested in the size of your intention. It is better to overstate the important than to understate it.

Reality is obtained not by imitation, but by producing the sense of nature.

The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.

If you do not act on a suggestion at first, you grow dull to its message.

The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.

All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.

Concentrate on a single feature - as, build all toward one eye - make all lines lead toward that eye.

The model is not to be copied, but to be realized.

Things should all be moving toward the expression of a great idea.

Has your drawing the meaning you saw in the model at first?

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.

A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.

Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.

You see, my mind takes me far, but my heart dreams of return.

The world is evil only when you become its slave.

What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.

Time wasted is a theft from God.

If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.

The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.

I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions.

Even if it doesn't sound like it at first, that's an identity that Europe can go out into the world with and take a leading role.

In a recession, you must be able to call into question everything you've done before.

I'd never buy something, even if it's a great brand, that is a competitor to something I already own; that's insane.

Death does not wait for you to be ready! Death is not considerate or fair. And make no mistake: here, you face death.

The training is nothing! The will is everything! The will to act.

I stood still, a prey to a thousand thoughts, stifled in the robe of the evening.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

Our special task, as French Canadians, is to insert into America the spirit of Christian France.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to photography.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.

Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result of a momentary equilibrium--an accident.

Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.

Oh be swift to live, make haste to be kind.

Don't mind what people say to you, find out what you have in yourself and do your best, that is the only hope in life

One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs.

Never ruin a good painting with the truth.

All art worthy of the name is religious.

I dream of an art of balance, of quietness, something analogous to a good armchair.

The wall around the window does not create two worlds.

Arrival = Prison, and the artist must never be a prisoner.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation.

If you meet God in solitude, you discover the God you meet is the God who embraces all people.

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply.