Henri Quotes

Europe has certainly lost confidence in itself. This was something that, when I was a young man, we never imagined would happen.

Will localizes us, thought universalizes us.

To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer.

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.

Ministry in no way is a privilege...it is the core of the Christian life. No Christian is a Christian without being a minister.

Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.

From the moment we claim the truth of being the beloved, we are faced with the call to become who we are.

Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.

True love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies the existence.

Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.

One can always reason with reason.

Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.

The ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence.

Nature's instructions are always slow; those of men are generally premature.

I have never taken a photograph without one thought in my head to amuse myself.

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.

Which questions guide our lives? Which questions do we make our own? Which questions deserve our undivided and full personal commitment? Finding the right questions is crucial to finding the answers.

The best path through life is the highway.

Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

Most striking at first is the appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long unconscious prior work.

Happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.

In love, the one who runs away is the winner.

Our first responsibility in the midst of violence is to prevent it from destroying us.

The only teaching that a professor can give, in my opinion, is that of thinking in front of his students.

Seek those who find your road agreeable, your personality and mind stimulating, your philosophy acceptable, and your experience helpful. Let those who do not, seek their own kind.

Yes, there is a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside for the guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as well in the life of all men. It is called the truth.

Let us turn elsewhere, to the wasps and bees, who unquestionably come first in the laying up of a heritage for their offspring.

During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.

...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind.

So long as the majority of Canadians have two countries, one here and one in Europe, national unity will remain a myth and a constant source of internecine quarrels.

Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.

Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.

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

When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

It is not I that am drawing, it is this thing at the end of my hand.

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.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared.

Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.