Pablo Picasso's Quotes

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

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

Youth has no age.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

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

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

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

The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

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

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

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.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

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.

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

The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.

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

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

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

My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

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

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

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.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

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

There are only two types of women - goddesses and doormats.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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.

It takes a long time to become young.

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.

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

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

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

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