Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them.

— Pablo Picasso

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

— Pablo Picasso

It takes a long time to become young.

— Pablo Picasso

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

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

— Pablo Picasso

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

— Pablo Picasso

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

— 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.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— 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

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.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

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.

— Pablo Picasso

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

— Pablo Picasso

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

— Pablo Picasso

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

— Pablo Picasso

I do not seek, I find.

— 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

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

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

Drink to me.

— Pablo Picasso

I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.

— Pablo Picasso

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

— Pablo Picasso

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

— 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

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

— Pablo Picasso

Everything you can imagine is real.

— Pablo Picasso

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

— Pablo Picasso

It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.

— Pablo Picasso

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

The artist is a receptacle for 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

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

— Pablo Picasso

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

— Pablo Picasso

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.

— Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— 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

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.

— Pablo Picasso

It is your work in life that is your ultimate seduction.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

— Pablo Picasso

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

— Pablo Picasso

Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

— 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

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

— Pablo Picasso

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

— Pablo Picasso

Work is necessary for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

— Pablo Picasso

Youth has no age.

— Pablo Picasso