Pablo Picasso Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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

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
The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.

Pablo Picasso
Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?

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

Pablo Picasso
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.

Pablo Picasso
Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

Pablo Picasso
.. this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

Pablo Picasso
We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

Pablo Picasso
I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.

Pablo Picasso
Now at least we know everything that painting isn't.

Pablo Picasso
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.

Pablo Picasso
On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d'Avignon [drafted as a soldier for World war 1.] I never saw them again [not literally a fact, but the close relation with Braque ended].

Pablo Picasso
For a long time I limited myself to one colour — as a form of discipline.
On his 'blue' and 'rose' periods

Pablo Picasso