Henry Moore Quotes

56 quotes in 680 categories

• The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.
• Being an artist is celebrating life.
• I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.
• A piece of sculpture can have a hole through it and not be weakened if the hole is of a studied size, shape, and direction.
• A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and shape of things.
• A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.
• Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath,…
• To know one thing, you must know the opposite.
• The creative habit is like a drug.
• There is nothing greater than enthusiasm.
• Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life -- but may be a penetration into…
• Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.
• Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but…
• One never knows what each day is going to bring. The important thing is to be open and ready for it.
• Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a…
• All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes…
• All art is an abstraction to some degree.
• The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula,…
• I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In…
• Nothing raises the price of a blessing like its removal; whereas, it was its continuance which should have taught us its value. [It is wise…

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