Pablo Picasso Quotes

Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

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

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

Computers are stupid.

I don't work from nature, I work like nature.

...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.

Man doesn't change. He keeps his habits. Instinctively, all those people found the same corner for their kitchen. To build a city, don't men choose the same sites? Under cities you always find other cities; other churches under churches, and other houses under houses.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

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

For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.

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.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.

What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

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

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Through education comes understanding. Through understanding comes true appreciation. All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

I do not evolve, I am.

Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

All art is subversive.

Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun

Painting is a jeu d'esprit.

When there's dust missing here or there, it's because someone has touched my things. I see immediately someone has been there. And it's because I live constantly with dust, in dust, that I prefer to wear gray suits, the only color on which it leaves no trace.

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.

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

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

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

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.

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.

I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.

What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

It takes a long time to become young.

I understand how you could see something in the root of a tree, a crack in the wall, in an eroded stone or pebble. But marble? It comes off in blocks and doesn't evoke any image. It does not inspire.

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

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

To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing.

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.