Pablo Picasso Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

Of computers:
But they are useless. They can only give you answers.

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

Pablo Picasso
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 grâce for the painter as well as for the picture.

Pablo Picasso
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. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.

Pablo Picasso
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.

Pablo Picasso
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.

Pablo Picasso
When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.

Pablo Picasso
The fig-leaves that hide the private parts of literature.

Pablo Picasso
I also often hear the word 'evolution'. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. 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. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression

Pablo Picasso
Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.

Pablo Picasso
The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting.

Pablo Picasso
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. After all, what is a painter? He is a collector who gets what he likes in others by painting them himself. This is how I begin and then it becomes something else.

Pablo Picasso
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.

Pablo Picasso
You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.
Said in his late years

Pablo Picasso
The quality of a painter depends on the amount of the past he carries with him.

Pablo Picasso
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.

Pablo Picasso
At an exhibition of children's drawings:
When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael: it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.

Pablo Picasso
I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.

Pablo Picasso
You don't need to show them to me [the notes of the complete interview which Christian Zervos], editor of 'Cahiers d'Art' showed Picasso after their conversations at Boisgeloup: Picasso's country place then]. The essential thing in our period of weak morale is to create enthusiasm. How many people have actually read Homer? All the same the whole world talks of him. In this way the Homeric legend is created. A legend in this sense provokes a valuable stimulus. Enthusiasm is what we need most, we and the younger generation.

Pablo Picasso
To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of non-sequiturs....

Pablo Picasso
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

Pablo Picasso
Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

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

Pablo Picasso
Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons..

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

Pablo Picasso
It was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.

Pablo Picasso
People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.

Pablo Picasso
How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.

Pablo Picasso
For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

Pablo Picasso
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.

Pablo Picasso