Pablo Picasso Quotes

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

“Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting.”

“Go and do the things you can't. That is how you get to do them.”

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

“If everyone would paint, political re-education would be unnecessary.”

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

“The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.”

“For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.”

“The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting. And the dust that falls on it every day remains there. Everything that's come down to us from the past has been conserved by dust.”

“To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”

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

“Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”

“If you don't know what color to take, take black.”

“If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”

“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.”

“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”

“As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.”

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

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

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”

“Why assume that to look is to see?”

“To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”

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

“Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.”

“Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.”