Henri Rousseau Quotations

Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.

Excuse my scribbling, it is late, and I have a poor candle.

It is often said that my heart is too open for my own good.

If a king tries to start a war, a mother should go to him and forbid it.

I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.

If you remove these lines in the painting, the colors are no longer effective.

Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live.

The landscapist lives in silence.

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

If it is reason that forms man then it is the emotions that guide her.

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.

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.

It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.

The principal problem I had during the five years I ran the Caisse - and I bet you that it will be the same problem for my successor - is the retention, recruitment and training of competent personnel.

The happiest is he who suffers the least pain; the most miserable, he who enjoys the least pleasure.

Little privations are easily endured when the heart is better treated than the body.

We are the two great painters of this era; you are in the Egyptian style, I in themodern style. (to Pablo Picasso)

Hatred as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.

The more humanity owes the poor man, the more society denies him.

The interest and the feelings are not due to colors; the lines of a painting that move us move us even more in a print.

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

The universe was born restless and has never since been still.

The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying "this is mine" and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

Cities are the sinks of the human race.

I felt before I thought

God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.

I have always believed that good is only beauty put into practice.

When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself "Yes indeed, all that belongs to me!"