182 Artful Quotes by Pablo Picasso

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

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

I'd like to live like a poor man -- only with lots of money.

Without great solitude no serious work is possible.

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

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

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativity.

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

We all know that art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realise the truth.

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

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty.

Rhythm is a perception of time... when drawing, the tiredness of the hand is a rhythm.

Accidents, try to change them -- it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.

The path to youth takes a lifetime.

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

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.

For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy.

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

Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.

You're either a goddess ... or a doormat.

I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.

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.

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.

There's no such thing as a bad Picasso, but some are less good than others.

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.

What I find horrible nowadays is that people are always trying to find a personality for themselves. Nobody bothers about what you might call a painter's ideal... the kind that's always existed... No. They couldn't care less about that.

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.

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.

We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone.

What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.

A picture lives by its legend -- not by anything else.

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.

It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

There ought to be an absolute dictatorship... a dictatorship of painters... a dictatorship of one painter... to suppress all those who have betrayed us.

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

I always forbade everyone to clean my studios, dust them, not only for fear they would disturb my things, but especially because I always counted on the protection of dust. It's my ally. I always let it settle where it likes. It's like a layer of protection.

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

The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.

Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.

It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.

It took me a lifetime.

Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.

Everything we can dream can be real.

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.

To model an object is to possess it.

It's insane how many Roman coins are being found! It's as if all Romans had holes in their pockets. They sowed coins wherever they went. Even in the fields. Maybe to grow money.

The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless.

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

I understand how you could see something in the root of a tree, a crack in the wall, in an eroded stone or pebble. But marble? It comes off in blocks and doesn't evoke any image. It does not inspire.

I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.

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.

The fingerprints of the god who amused himself fashioning them -- I can see them on any bone whatsoever.

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.

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

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

The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.

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.

We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

I want to create a cat like the real cats I see crossing the streets, not like those you see in houses. They have nothing in common. The cat of the streets has bristling fur. It runs like a fiend, and if it looks at you, you think it is going to jump in your face.

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

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.

Sex and art are the same thing.

When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few... if you are lucky.

If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.

Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown.

It's a poor artist who borrows -- a good artist steals.

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy. (about Guernica).

When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?' And I'd say, 'No, you did.'

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

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

Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.

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

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?

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm.

A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.

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.

We didn't want to sign the painting itself, that would have interfered with the composition. And even later, for that reason or for another, I sometimes marked my canvases on the back. If you don't see my signature and the date, madam, it's because the frame is hiding it.

I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.

I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

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.

Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it's true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That's what's important.

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.

The secret of many of my deformations -- which many people do not understand -- is that there is an interaction, an intereffect between the lines in a painting: one line attracts the other and at the point of maximum attraction the lines curve in toward the attracting point and form is altered.

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.

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.

The only pictorial matter that is of interest to me is the matter and sentiments brought about by the work itself.

There's nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog, and that goes for women, too.

What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.

When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays.

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.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

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.

You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it's absolutely steady, and much more exciting.

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.

There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.

The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.

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

I want to know one thing, what is color?

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

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.

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.

It's always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further.

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.

Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.

I draw like other people bite their nails.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don't quite know where it comes from.

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

I do not seek. I find.

You mustn't expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn't interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.

Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.

My mother said to me, If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope. Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

There are more copies than originals among people.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

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

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

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.

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

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

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

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

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.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

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.

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

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

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

We don't grow older, we grow riper.

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

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

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.