Pablo Picasso Artist Quotations

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.

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

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

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

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

There are only two types of women - goddesses and doormats.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

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.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

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

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

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

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.

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.

It's not what the artist does that counts; it's what he is.

Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

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

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.

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.

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.

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.

It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.

When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.

All Children are Artists

The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.

Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the 'courage' to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age.

...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.

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.

I never calculate. That is why those who do, calculate so much less accurately than I.

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

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

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?

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.

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.