"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not..." - Quote by Pablo Picasso

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
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“I do not evolve, I am.”
— Pablo Picasso
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— Pablo Picasso
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— Pablo Picasso

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“But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.”
— Carl Jung
“The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.”
— Socrates
“Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.”
— John Updike

More on Understanding

“In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.”
— Walt Whitman
“To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world , and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason , this and nothing else is philosophy.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
“This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.”
— Franz Kafka