Top 100 Pablo Picasso Quotes
#2. If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
Pablo Picasso
#4. The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.
Pablo Picasso
#5. Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it's true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That's what's important.
Pablo Picasso
#6. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
Pablo Picasso
#8. One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.
Pablo Picasso
#9. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
#10. To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
Pablo Picasso
#11. You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.
Pablo Picasso
#12. The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.
Pablo Picasso
#14. So there's only one tactic for the state: kill the seers.
Pablo Picasso
#15. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#16. The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Pablo Picasso
#17. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#18. We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone.
Pablo Picasso
#19. People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.
Pablo Picasso
#21. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#23. There are only two types of women: goddesses and doormats.
Pablo Picasso
#24. I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.
Pablo Picasso
#25. A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.
Pablo Picasso
#26. For me, there are two kinds of women - goddesses and doormats.
Pablo Picasso
#28. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#30. Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
Pablo Picasso
#31. For being a bad student I was banished to the 'calaboose' - a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping
Pablo Picasso
#32. The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting.
Pablo Picasso
#33. It's not what the artist does that counts; it's what he is.
Pablo Picasso
#34. The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.
Pablo Picasso
#36. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#37. You mustn't expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn't interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.
Pablo Picasso
#38. We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years. (Upon exiting the Lascaux cave, France)
Pablo Picasso
#39. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#40. When you're really young, you're young for life.
Pablo Picasso
#41. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#42. Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.
Pablo Picasso
#43. It is not what an artist does that counts ... but what he is.
Pablo Picasso
#44. If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.
Pablo Picasso
#45. Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.
Pablo Picasso
#46. There ought to be an absolute dictatorship ... a dictatorship of painters ... a dictatorship of one painter ... to suppress all those who have betrayed us ...
Pablo Picasso
#47. For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart
Pablo Picasso
#49. Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.
Pablo Picasso
#50. Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting.
Pablo Picasso
#51. Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy.
Pablo Picasso
#52. No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.
Pablo Picasso
#53. Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.
Pablo Picasso
#54. I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.
Pablo Picasso
#55. We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
Pablo Picasso
#56. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#58. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#60. An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.
Pablo Picasso
#61. Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits ... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
Pablo Picasso
#62. [In developing your potential] ... I don't develop; I am
Pablo Picasso
#63. Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don't quite know where it comes from.
Pablo Picasso
#64. When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.
Pablo Picasso
#65. 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 ...
Pablo Picasso
#66. Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.
Pablo Picasso
#67. A picture lives by its legend - not by anything else.
Pablo Picasso
#68. If you don't know what color to take, take black ...
Pablo Picasso
#69. While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.
Pablo Picasso
#70. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#72. Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.
Pablo Picasso
#74. If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.
Pablo Picasso
#75. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#77. Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.
Pablo Picasso
#78. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#79. Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy.
Pablo Picasso
#80. Almost every evening, either I went to [Georges] Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's work. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was.
Pablo Picasso
#81. There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Pablo Picasso
#83. When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays ...
Pablo Picasso
#84. If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse ... but surely you will see the wildness!
Pablo Picasso
#85. In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.
Pablo Picasso
#86. When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.
Pablo Picasso
#87. Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
(about Guernica).
Pablo Picasso
#89. I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.
Pablo Picasso
#91. They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.
Pablo Picasso
#93. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#94. I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.
Pablo Picasso
#96. 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
Pablo Picasso
#97. Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
Pablo Picasso
#98. There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.
Pablo Picasso
#99. Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.
Pablo Picasso
#100. Even if the painting is green, well then! The 'subject' is the green. There is always a subject; it's a joke to suppress the subject, it's impossible.
Pablo Picasso
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