Top 440 Quotes & Sayings by Pablo Picasso - Page 3

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

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.'

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.

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.

Art is a leap into the dark.

The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm.

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.

I've reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the good in doing it?

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

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

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.

Sex and art are the same thing.

...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.

Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.

Art is lies that tell the truth.

People who read are people who dream.

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

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.

We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.

Everything we can dream can be real.

It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.

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

In the end there is only Matisse.

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

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. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.

I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.

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

By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.

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

Why assume that to look is to see?

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.

What I want is that my picture should evoke nothing but emotion.

It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.

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

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

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.

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

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.

Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!

Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.

All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

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

Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy.

To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

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

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 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.

If you can imagine it...it is real

It's not what the artist does that counts; it's what he is.

Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

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 picture lives by its legend - not by anything else.

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

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.

Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.