Henry Moore Quotes

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

Being an artist is celebrating life. ~ 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

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

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

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about. ~ Carl Andre

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

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. ~ 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

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

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE
-by Rochelle Distelheim
To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife
who washes the socks and the children,
and returns phone calls and library books and types.
In other words, the reason there are so many more
Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.
It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.
And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.
Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater
matinees--on Saturdays?
Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,
chicken pox or chipped teeth?
Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender
his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.
Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.
And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three
for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.
I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,
and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler
On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.
Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,
tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,
and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse
unless she also helps with the laundry.
-Rochelle Distelheim
=============================== ~ Rochelle Distelheim

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

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE

To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife
who washes the socks and the children,
and returns phone calls and library books and types.
In other words, the reason there are so many more
Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.
It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.
And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.
Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater
matinees--on Saturdays?
Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,
chicken pox or chipped teeth?
Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender
his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.
Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.
And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three
for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.
I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,
and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler
On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.
Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,
tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,
and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse
unless she also helps with the laundry. ~ Rochelle Distelheim

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Henry Moore

The creative habit is like a drug. ~ Henry Moore

In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003. ~ Jane Leavy

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. ~ Henry Moore

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

There is a right physical size for every idea. ~ Henry Moore

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. ~ 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

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

There is nothing greater than enthusiasm. ~ 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

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

The important thing is somehow to begin. ~ Henry Moore

People think that they see, but they don't. ~ Henry Moore

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

Seeing that picture, for me, was like Chartres Cathedral. ~ Henry Moore

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. ~ Henry Moore

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

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. ~ Henry Moore

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it. ~ 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

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

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

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years ~ Henry Moore

As Henry Moore carved
or modelled his sculpture every day,
he strove to surpass Donatello
4. and failed, but woke the next morning
elated for another try. ~ Donald Hall

This is a Spartacan fighting knife. Heard of the Spartacan Scouts? Rough boys. This knife belonged to one of them. He died saving my life. ~ Henry V. O'Neil

When I'm at the greatest odds with my body, it's usually because I feel my body's betraying me, whether that's been in the past, struggling with my weight and feeling that I couldn't eat what I wanted to eat, or that I couldn't get my body to do what I wanted it to do. ~ Demi Moore

All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy. ~ Henry David Thoreau

All I ask of life, he says, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt. ~ Henry Miller

One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Morality is a private and costly luxury. ~ Henry Adams

Success is a bag of determination about to erupt. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

When first thy eyes unveil, give thy soul leave
To do the like; our bodies but forerun
The spirit's duty. True hearts spread and heave
Unto their God, as flow'rs do to the sun.
Give him thy first thoughts then; so shalt thou keep
Him company all day, and in him sleep. ~ Henry Vaughan

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs. ~ Henry Ford

I want to be in New York. It's the place to be. ~ Mandy Moore

The Lord makes his servants bold. ~ Henry B. Eyring

There is a middlebrow snobbery in America that praises everything on public television and disdains everything on the commercial networks as a blight. ~ Henry Fairlie

Make no judgment of others but yourself. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

The mind resorts to reason for want of training. ~ Henry Adams

Make Your way to the everlasting ruins, to all that the enemy has destroyed in the sanctuary. Psalm 74:3 ~ Beth Moore

Hating someone is giving them too much, just leave them alone. ~ Henry Rollins

The country is lyric, the town dramatic. When mingled, they make the most perfect musical drama. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply. ~ Henry James

The Brighton air used of old to make plain girls pretty and pretty girls prettier still - I don't know whether it works the spell now.
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ Henry James

Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies, -neighbors are kind enough for that, -but to do the like office to our spirits. For this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open. ~ Henry James

It's awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman. ~ Henry Steele Commager

Grow up, Brett baby, I would share a lot of things with a lot of people, money, clothes, bed and board, even my last crust I'd be willing to share, but one thing I won't share is a man. You'd better believe it. ~ Mary Moore

indeed I know for a fact that you do know, what the fuck kind of questions are you asking me ~ Michael F. Moore

I'm a very basic dresser. I'm not interested in calling too much attention to myself. I like to look cool without being too noticeable. ~ Julianne Moore

Libertarians are learning to their sorrow that big businessmen cannot necessarily be relied upon to be their allies in the battle against extension of governmental encroachments. ~ Henry Hazlitt

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body. ~ Henry David Thoreau

When God is about to give His people the expected good, He pours out a Spirit of prayer, and it is a good sign that He is coming towards them in mercy. ~ Matthew Henry

Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Every relationship has problems, because every person has problems, and the place that our problems appear most glaringly is in our close relationships. The key is whether or not we can hear from others where we are wrong, and accept their feedback without getting defensive. Time and again, the Bible says that someone who listens to feedback from others is wise, but someone who does not is a fool. ~ Henry Cloud

And her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world ~ Henry James

The secret is just to not give up hope. It's very hard not to, because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side. And you just have to hang in through that." ~ George Lucas ~ Vanessa Moore