Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
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.
He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
I do not seek. I find.
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
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.
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.
It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
There are only two types of women - goddesses and doormats.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
Everything you can imagine is real.
Action is the foundational key to all success.
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
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.
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
Youth has no age.
The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.
To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
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.
Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?
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.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
When I was a child, 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.
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
It takes a long time to become young.
My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
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.
If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
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.