Pablo Picasso Quotations

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

It takes a long time to become young.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

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.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

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

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

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

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

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.

The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

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.

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.

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.

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

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

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

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

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

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

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

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

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.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

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 does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

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

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

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.

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

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

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

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.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

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

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.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

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

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

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

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

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

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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

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

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

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 end up as the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

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.

When they tell me I'm too old to do something, I attempt it immediately.

One starts to get young at sixty, and then it's too late

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite -- that particular peach is but a detail.

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

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.

I'd like to live like a poor man with lots of money

I can explain the picture to you, and you will understand my explanation, but you will not understand the picture.

I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them.

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

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

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.

My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors life.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

My mother said to me, ''If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.'' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. --Pablo Picasso 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.

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.

There are painters that can change the sun into a yellow blot, but there are others, that due to their talent and intelligence can change a yellow blot into the sun.

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.

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

I should like to live like a poor man, with a great deal of money

I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision.

I wanted to be a painter, and I became Picasso,

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child

It takes a long time to grow young.

Art washes away the dust of everyday life.

If i wanted to become a monk, I would have ultimately become the Bishop.If i wanted to become a soldier, I would ultimately become the General, but because I wanted to become a painter, i became Picasso.

I don't paint things the way I see them, but the way I think them.