Top 440 Quotes & Sayings by Pablo Picasso - Page 4

Action is the foundation of all success.

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.

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

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

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul.

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.

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.

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.

In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thoughts change.

Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touched by God."

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.

When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Action is the fundamental key to success.

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

Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

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

If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?

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

If there is something to steal, I steal it.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?

I have had no true friends, only lovers.

It took me a lifetime.

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.

What I achieve the first day can be perfectly valid, but it is not satisfying. If I can go that far spontaneously, then I must shed that result as an old skin and inquire further into the unknown, or at least the not-yet-known-to-myself.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

I hate it when people pilfer my things.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

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

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.

In one way or another, I always marked my pictures. But there were times when I put my signature on the back of the canvas. All my works from the cubist period, until about 1914, have my name and the date on the back side of the stretcher. I know someone spread the story that in Céret, Braque and I decided not to sign our pictures anymore. But that's just a legend!

I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things - they have to get along with one another.

I do not evolve, I am.

The only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

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

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be.

The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it's for an intelligent reason. So it's really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You're better off acting capriciously.

What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall.

One cannot be a sorcerer all the time. How could one live?

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.

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

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.

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.

A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder

If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.