Sculpture Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old sculpture quotes, sculpture sayings, and sculpture proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object. Chuck Close
I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment. Andy Goldsworthy
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. Michaelangelo
Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools. Auguste Rodin
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting. Pablo Picasso
A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere. Francois de la Rochefoucauld
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture. Tom Stoppard
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity. Damien Hirst
You have to create your life. You have to carve it, like a sculpture. William Shatner
Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself. John Ruskin
It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture. Louise Bourgeois
The picture that approaches sculpture nearest Is the best picture. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sculpture is like archaeology: You dig in and you find something. Georg Baselitz
The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. Philip Guston
I really don't have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists. Jimmy Carl Black
Sculpture is the essence of things, the essence of nature, that which is perpetually human. Wilhelm Lehmbruck
I did my sculpture as a painter. I did not work as a sculptor. Henri Matisse
Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in. Henry Moore
Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding. Michaelangelo
Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting. Barnett Newman
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