You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of t… - Henri Matisse

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.