Best Pablo Picasso Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

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

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

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

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.

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

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