Pablo Picasso Quotes

Lord, protect me from what I want!

Art isn't done to decorate apartments, but to wage war against the enemy.

Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime.

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.

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.

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

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

So there's only one tactic for the state: kill the seers.

You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.

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

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age...

To model an object is to possess it.

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.

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.

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.

Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don't misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence.

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.

It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact.

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

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

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.

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

A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

He was an Afghan Hound name Kabul. Since him I have had other Afghan Hounds.... Perhaps I am looking for his ghost. He is the only one that I sometimes think about. Often, if he comes in to my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rested against his head.

I draw like other people bite their nails.

Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

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

The more technique there is, the less there is

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

"Picasso" is of Italian origin, as you know. And the name a person bears or adopts has its importance.

That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.

I've reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.

If I don't have red, I use blue.

The path to youth takes a lifetime.

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

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

Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.

Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.

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

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

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

A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it

If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake.

If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

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.

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

You're either a goddess ... or a doormat.