Henri Rousseau Quotes

#1. Cities are the sinks of the human race.

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

#9. 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.

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

#11. 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.

Henri Rousseau

#12. The landscapist lives in silence.

Henri Rousseau

#13. I felt before I thought

Henri Rousseau

#14. 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.

Henri Rousseau

#15. 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!"

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

#17. 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.

Henri Rousseau

#18. Why did you paint a couch in the middle of the jungle?"
Rousseau: "Because one has a right to paint one's dreams.

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

#20. 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.

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau

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

Henri Rousseau