Henry Moore Art Quotations

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.

To be an artist is to believe in life.

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

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.

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 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'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.

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

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

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

Art is to make our lives richer and fuller.

The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.

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.

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

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

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