Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Sympathy
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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! … I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things – so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: The Artist
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.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Face, Faces, Reality
Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Fame
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Action
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.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Arts, Artists, Lies, Art
If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Culture
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: The Artist, Drawing
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Humor, General, Computers, One liners, Questions, Technology
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Vision, Prophecy
You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Trust
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Money, Wealth
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.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Tyranny, Individuality
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art, Inner-child, Children
I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful?. One must speak of problems in painting!
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Beauty
He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Belief
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
Topics: God
Drink to me.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Famous Last Words
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.
—Pablo Picasso
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: One liners, Art, Arts, Artists
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
—Pablo Picasso
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
Youth has no age.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Youth
It takes a long time to become young.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Aging, Age
The artist is a receptacle for the 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.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: The Artist, Inspiration
Everything you can imagine is real.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Reality, Imagination
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Miracles
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Love, Life
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Georges Braque French Painter
- Miguel de Unamuno Spanish Philosopher, Writer
- Edgar Degas French Artist
- Michelangelo Italian Painter
- Grandma Moses American Painter
- Claude Monet French Painter
- Bahya ibn Paquda Jewish Philosopher
- Jacinto Benavente Spanish Dramatist
- Miguel de Cervantes Spanish Novelist
- Lope de Vega Spanish Playwright, Poet
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