Pablo Picasso Quotes

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

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 can see the light but we are still inside the tunnel, ... We have not been able to get to all the communities.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.

Painting is a jeu d'esprit.

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.

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.

There are more copies than originals among people.

To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.

Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the 'courage' to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age.

The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

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.

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

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

[In developing your potential] ... I don't develop; I am

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

If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.

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.

Through education comes understanding. Through understanding comes true appreciation. All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.

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

The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm.

Art is a leap into the dark.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

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

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.

People who read are people who dream.

Good taste is the enemy of creativity.

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

I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.

I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.

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

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

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Without great solitude no serious work is possible.

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude.

Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.

All things considered, there is only Matisse.

We are all born children- the trick is remaining one.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy.

I consider a work of art as a product of calculations, calculations that are frequently unknown to the author himself.

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.

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

What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

I'm not a developer; I am.

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.

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