Pablo Picasso Quotes

There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.

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.

It's insane how many Roman coins are being found! It's as if all Romans had holes in their pockets. They sowed coins wherever they went. Even in the fields. Maybe to grow money . . .

When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.

Youth has no age.

People are always asking me to sign my old canvases. It's ridiculous!

There's nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog, and that goes for women, too.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?

Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice.

A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder

In the end there is only Matisse.

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.

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

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

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.

If there is something to steal, I steal it.

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

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

My friends back in Barcelona called me by that name (Picasso). It was stranger, more resonant, than "Ruiz." And those are probably the reasons I adopted it. Do you know what appealed to me about that name? Well, it was undoubtedly the double s, which is fairly unusual in Spain.

If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?

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

Manifesting takes place from Spirit. It doesn't take place from form, from the physical world. You've got to know that what you want to manifest will occur.

I paint what I think, not what I see.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.

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

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

There are more copies than originals among people.

Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon.

I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.

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.

We don't grow older, we grow riper.

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.

Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.

For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography

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.

Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.