Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Moore

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English sculptor Henry Moore.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. As well as sculpture, Moore produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.

English - Sculptor | July 30, 1898 - August 31, 1986

Source: Wikipedia

Since the Gothic, European sculpture has become overgrown with moss, weeds - all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.

Henry Moore

Everything I do is intended to be big.

Henry Moore

I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.

Henry Moore

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. 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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.

Henry Moore

There are three fundamental poses of the human figure. One is standing. The other is seated, and the third is lying down... Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.

Henry Moore

Turner - whether on canvas or paper - can create almost measurable distances of space and air - air that you can draw, in which you can work out what the section through it would be. The space he creates is not emptiness; it is filled with 'solid' atmosphere.

Henry Moore

In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor.

Henry Moore

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Henry Moore

Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

I was the seventh in the family. By the time I came along, one brother and two sisters had already become teachers, and this was the sort of path carved out for the rest of the family.

Henry Moore

There are universal shapes to which everybody is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.

Henry Moore

In Giacometti's work, the armature has once again become the life-line of the sculpture, and also, he's brought back to sculpture a nervous sensitivity which the 'pure carving' side of sculpture can lose sight of altogether.

Henry Moore

I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.

Henry Moore

So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn't like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.

Henry Moore

The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.

Henry Moore

I believe that nothing should be taboo - no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to a discovery.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

To be an artist is to believe in life.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

Being an artist is celebrating life.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and the shape of things, and it's not just Ihe shape of any one thing, but the shape of any thing and everything.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

There is nothing greater than enthusiasm.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

The important thing is somehow to begin.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

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.

Henry Moore

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

Henry Moore

Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Moore

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