Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

The important thing is somehow to begin.

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

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

What's important is finding out what works for you.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

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

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

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

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

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

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.