Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French artist Henri Rousseau.
Last updated on December 18, 2024.
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.
It is often said that my heart is too open for my own good.
Excuse my scribbling, it is late, and I have a poor candle.
I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.
Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.
If a king tries to start a war, a mother should go to him and forbid it.
I have always believed that good is only beauty put into practice.
The universe was born restless and has never since been still.
The landscapist lives in silence.
Nature's instructions are always slow; those of men are generally premature.
From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live.
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.
The more humanity owes the poor man, the more society denies him.
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 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.
Little privations are easily endured when the heart is better treated than the body.
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.
Cities are the sinks of the human race.
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.
God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
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.
If it is reason that forms man then it is the emotions that guide her.
It is not I that am drawing, it is this thing at the end of my hand.
It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.
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!"
Hatred as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.
We are the two great painters of this era; you are in the Egyptian style, I in themodern style. (to Pablo Picasso)
I felt before I thought
Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.