Henri Rousseau quotes:

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!"

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

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

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 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.

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

Cities are the sinks of the human race.

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

Hatred as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

I felt before I thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

The landscapist lives in silence.

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

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 universe was born restless and has never since been still.

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