Top 160 Robert Henri Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.”

— Robert Henri

52. “After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.”

— Robert Henri

53. “There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.”

— Robert Henri

54. “When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.”

— Robert Henri

55. “All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one’s faculties.”

— Robert Henri

56. “Strokes carry a message whether you will it or not. The stroke is just like the artist at the time he makes it. All the certainties, all the uncertainties, all the bigness of his spirit and the littlenesses are in it.”

— Robert Henri

57. “Through art, mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men. They are the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them.”

— Robert Henri

58. “Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.”

— Robert Henri

59. “There is no art without contemplation.”

— Robert Henri

60. “An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.”

— Robert Henri

61. “No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places.”

— Robert Henri

62. “All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.”

— Robert Henri

63. “Do not expect pictures to say the expected; some of the best will have surprises for you, which will, at first, shock you.”

— Robert Henri

64. “There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.”

— Robert Henri

65. “It’s a wrong idea that a master is a finished person. Masters are very faulty; they haven’t learned everything and they know it.”

— Robert Henri

66. “A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.”

— Robert Henri

67. “We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists – find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest – but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.”

— Robert Henri

68. “To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.”

— Robert Henri

69. “I paint for the sole purpose of magnifying the privilege of being alive.”

— Robert Henri

70. “Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves.”

— Robert Henri

71. “Personal experimentation is revealing, and once you get into it, immensely engaging.”

— Robert Henri

72. “We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.”

— Robert Henri

73. “There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.”

— Robert Henri

74. “Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.”

— Robert Henri

75. “A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.”

— Robert Henri

76. “Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.”

— Robert Henri

77. “The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.”

— Robert Henri

78. “Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.”

— Robert Henri

79. “Self-acquainta nce is a rare condition.”

— Robert Henri

80. “Count on big lines to express your ideas.”

— Robert Henri

81. “A weak background is a deadly thing.”

— Robert Henri

82. “Whatever you feel or think your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke.”

— Robert Henri

83. “Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.”

— Robert Henri

84. “There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.”

— Robert Henri

85. “Don’t worry about the rejections. Everybody that’s good has gone through it. Don’t let it matter if your works are not “accepted” at once. The better or more personal you are the less likely they are of acceptance.”

— Robert Henri

86. “I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul.”

— Robert Henri

87. “Water runs down hill concisely. There is no quibbling about it. It does not have to run up hill in order to be entertaining. Man has always followed its course with fascination. The soul of man may reveal its mysteries through direct expression, simple speech, simple gesture, simple painting, just as the soul of the brook is expressed in full simplicity and economy.”

— Robert Henri

88. “There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.”

— Robert Henri

89. “The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art.”

— Robert Henri

90. “The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.”

— Robert Henri

91. “Work always as if you were a master, expect from yourself a masterpiece.”

— Robert Henri

92. “Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says ‘My crowd doesn’t run that way.’ I say, don’t run with crowds.”

— Robert Henri

93. “An artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.”

— Robert Henri

94. “Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition.”

— Robert Henri

95. “All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.”

— Robert Henri

96. “Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.”

— Robert Henri

97. “Your only hope of satisfying others is in satisfying yourself. I speak of a great satisfaction, not a commercial satisfaction.”

— Robert Henri

98. “Each man must seek for himself the people who hold the essential beauty, and each man must eventually say to himself as I do, ’these are my people and all that I have I owe to them.”

— Robert Henri

99. “Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.”

— Robert Henri

100. “The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.”

— Robert Henri