With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.

The splitting up of color [as Impressionists did] brought the splitting up of form and contour . . . Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquility of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.

If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.