Pablo Picasso Quotes

A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.

A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it

You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

Inspiration exists, but you have to find it working.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes - and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done

It is important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We've got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on our time schedule.

Paradise is to love many things with a passion.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot be true artists because they like men, and since they themselves are women they are reverting to normality.

Rhythm is a perception of time ... when drawing, the tiredness of the hand is a rhythm.

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.

To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was ...

I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.

Now there is fame! Of all - hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public - fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.

In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall.

Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.

For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.

If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it's absolutely steady, and much more exciting.

Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits ... In art, there is room for all possibilities.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Action is the foundation of all success.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few ... if you are lucky.

So there's only one tactic for the state: kill the seers.

Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.

All art is subversive.

If you don't know what color to take, take black ...

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

We now know that Art is not the truth ... but rather a way of approaching the truth.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

It is a miracle that one does not dissolve into one's bath like a lump of sugar.

If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.

A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.

A picture lives by its legend - not by anything else.

I would like to live like a poor person with a lot of money.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought

When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

My hand tells me what I'm thinking.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

It's always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further ...

For me, there are two kinds of women - goddesses and doormats.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

I do things I don't know how to do in order to learn how to do them.

You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.

When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?

I don't seek, I find.

All things considered, there is only Matisse.

Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct. They became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours. Don't misunderstand me: shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.

There are more copies than originals among people.

When they say that I am too old to make a thing, I try to make it immediately.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.

The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.

Why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way ... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.

What do you think an artist is An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscle On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness.

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
(about Guernica).

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays ...

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms ... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is.

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.

Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.