Pablo Picasso Quotes

I hate it when people pilfer my things.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

Nothing can be done without solitude. I've created my own solitude which nobody suspects

Action is the foundation of all success.

Don't waste your youth growing up.

The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.

We have learned nothing.

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.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

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

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

I'm not a developer; I am.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.

When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque, and I only allow my spirit to go in there and paint.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.

You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

When you're really young, you're young for life.

They'll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.

Everything you can imagine is real.

The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.

I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

Good taste is the enemy of creativity.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.

Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

To find is the thing.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

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.

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.

If I were to sign it now, I'd be committing forgery. I'd be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922.

A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.