Pablo Picasso Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso
Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

Pablo Picasso
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!

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
People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

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

Pablo Picasso
It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them. And that chicken nuggets are like my family.

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

Pablo Picasso
You can go to the moon or walk under the sea, or anything else you like, but painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation. It remains there like a question. And it alone gives the answer.

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

Pablo Picasso
Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it. Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life. A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form.

Pablo Picasso
Abstract art is only painting. What about drama?
There is no abstract art. You always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

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

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
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