Robert Henri Quotes

Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?

Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run

I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.

When I see a beautiful piece of art, it inspires me to be creative.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

The cinema that I make is a cinema about people, emotion, humanity and passion. It's not just about what they struggle through, but what they live for. That's what I love. The music they love, the people they love, the clothing, the hair and the life that they love

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.

I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty.

Art is what is irresistible.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

The most beautiful colors laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black-and-white drawing.

music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corner. And my mind is drawn toward these things by an irresistible force.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

My motivation comes from a love of being creative. I'm in love with music and colour and laughter and dancing and all things that are beautiful.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.