Henry Moore Quotes

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

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

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

- Henry Moore

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

- 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 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 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

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

- Henry Moore

Everything I do is intended to be big.

- Henry Moore

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

- Henry Moore