Pablo Picasso Quotes

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

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.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

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

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 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.

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.

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

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.

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.

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

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

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

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

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

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.

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

He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.

We don’t grow older, we grow riper.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

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

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

Everything you can imagine is real.

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.

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.

I do not seek. I find.

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

Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

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.

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.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

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

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

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

I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

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

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

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

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

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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