Henri Matisse Mean Quotations

Truly, I'm not joking when I thank my lucky stars for the awful operation I had, since it has made me young again and philosophical which means that I don't want to fritter away the new lease on life I've been given.

Drawing is . . . not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

From Bonheur de Vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eighty-two - I have not changed; not in the way my friends mean who want to compliment me, no matter what, on my good health, but because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means...

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.