Henry Moore Quotations

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'.

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Seeing that picture, for me, was like Chartres Cathedral.

I think about sculpture all the time. I work at it for ten to twelve hours a day. I even dream about it. If as a result I was only to produce something that everyone immediately understood I would't have been thinking very profoundly.

The creative habit is like a drug.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.

Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life -- but may be a penetration into reality...as expression of the significance of life, a stimulation to greater effort in living.

I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper... but as my eye takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.

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 it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.

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 spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.

Our knowledge of shape and form remains, in general, a mixture of visual and of tactile experiences... A child learns about roundness from handling a ball far more than from looking at it.

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 to be grateful of what we have while we have it.]

Talking about one's work releases the energy and tension to do and make.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

You must always be open to your luck. You cannot force it, but you can recognize it.

Clever people can copy the handwriting of an artist - it's like forging a person's signature.

The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation.

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.

One mustn't let technique be the consciously important thing. It should be at the service of expressing the form.

All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

Being an artist is celebrating life.

The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.

Art is to make our lives richer and fuller.

Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

I would like my work to be thought of as a celebration of life and nature..

People think that they see, but they don't.

There is a right physical size for every idea.

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.

I sometimes draw just for its own enjoyment.

Art is a continuous activity with no separation between past and present.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

Art is not to do with the practical side of making a living. It's to live a fuller human life.

The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organized memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.

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, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

There is nothing greater than enthusiasm.

I think, what has this day brought me, and what have I given it?

If an artist tries consciously to do something to others, it is to stretch their eyes, their thoughts, to something they would not see or feel if the artist had not done it. To do this, he has to stretch his own first.

The construction of the human figure, its tremendous variety of balance, of size, of rhythm, all those things make the human form much more difficult to get right in a drawing than anything else.

The important thing is somehow to begin.

I'm very grateful that I was too poor to get to art school until I was 21. . . I was old enough when I got there to know how to get something out of it.

A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and shape of things.

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, and feeds inspiration.

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.

I have always been very interested in landscape... I find that all natural forms are a source of unending interest - tree trunks, the growth of branches from the trunk, each finding its own individual air-space.

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life.

Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.

You leave space for the body, imagining the other part even though it isn't there.

I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.

Sculpture is an art of the open air... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.

I find drawing a useful outlet for ideas for which there is not time enough to realize as sculpture... And I sometimes draw just for its own enjoyment.

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 away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.

In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture.

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

Never think of the surface except as an extension of a volume.

One never knows what each day is going to bring. The important thing is to be open and ready for it.

To be an artist is to believe in life.