Pablo Picasso Quotes

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.

Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.

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.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?'. And I'd say, 'No, you did.'

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

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

I don't seek, I find.

I don't think I'm wrong when I say that the most beautiful objects of the "stone age" were made of skin, fabric, and especially wood. The "stone age" ought to be called the "wood age." How many African statues are made of stone, bone, or ivory? Maybe one in a thousand! And prehistoric man had no more ivory at his disposal than African tribes. Maybe even less. He must have had thousands of wooden fetishes, all gone now.

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

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

Sex and art are the same thing.

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

Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!

To be young, really young, takes a very long time.

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

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

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

We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.

Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.

The artist is a receptacle for 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.

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

It took me a lifetime.

I don't develop; I am.

It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.

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.

Computers are useless - all they can give you are answers.

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he's a painter, or ears if he's a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he's a poet, or even, if he's a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, burning, or happy events in the world.

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

Have you noticed that bones are always modeled and not carved, that you always have the impression they come from a mold, that they were first modeled in clay? Any bone you look at, you always find fingerprints on it.

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

Everything we can dream can be real.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

All Children are Artists

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

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; 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.

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

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

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

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

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.

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

I have a real passion for bones. I have many others in Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, dog's and sheep's heads. I even have a rhinoceros skull.