Pablo Picasso Quotes

I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.

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

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

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.

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

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

Inspiration exists, but you have to find it working.

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

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.

Don't waste your youth growing up.

...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.

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.

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.

For me, there are two kinds of women - goddesses and doormats.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

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

Art is lies that tell the truth.

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

Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.

Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

I am exhausted if I don't work.

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

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

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.

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

What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

In art, practice always comes before theory.

Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more.

You can't run a without taking risks.

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

When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

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

You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.

In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

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.

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

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

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

A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder

Computers are stupid.

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. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.

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

When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.

It took me a lifetime.

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

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

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

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.

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

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

I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things - they have to get along with one another.