Barbara Hepworth Quotations

The United Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure.

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep.

Body experience... is the centre of creation.

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.

I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour

My works are an imitation of my own past and present.

The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.

I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.