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Pablo Picasso Quotes

Painter
Born On
1881-10-25
Died On
1973-04-08
Birth Place
Málaga, Spain
Death Place
Mougins
Birth Sign
scorpio
Father
Don José Ruiz y Blasco
Mother
María Picasso y López
Spouse
Jacqueline Roque, Olga Khokhlova
Nationality
Spanish
Spanish Cubist painter, Picasso was known to have shared a long-standing close association with Russian-French artist, Marc Zakharovich Chagall, until a rendezvous in 1964. Pablo was meeting Chagall for dinner, at the latter's residence in France. During the meeting, the Spanish genius asked his friend when the latter was planning to return to Russia. The host replied, "After you. I hear you are greatly loved there but not your work. You try to make it there and I'll wait and see how you do." What Chagall was referring to was the fact that Picasso had gained fame in Russia only because he was a Communist. For obvious reasons, the Russian artist's reply didn't go down too well with Picasso and a verbal tiff ensued between the two friends. Pablo said, "I guess with you it's a question of business. You won't go unless there's money in it." Though Chagall was supposedly grinning, he wasn't quite happy with the remark. Thus, this episode marked the end of the strong bond these two titans had shared for so many years. These men were apparently asked much later as to what they thought of each other's works. According to Picasso's lover, Fran'oise Gilot, the painter believed, "When Henri Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I'm not crazy about his roosters and asses and flying violinists, and all the folklore, but his canvases are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last things he's done in Vence (where Matisse painted his late frescos in the chapel) convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has." Wondering what opinion the Russian virtuoso held? "What a genius, that Picasso. It's a pity he doesn't paint."

Everything you can imagine is real.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Pablo Picasso

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

Pablo Picasso

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

It takes a long time to become young.

Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso

I do not seek. I find.

Pablo Picasso

The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Youth has no age.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

Pablo Picasso

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Pablo Picasso

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

Pablo Picasso

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

Pablo Picasso

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

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

We don't grow older, we grow riper.

Pablo Picasso

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

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

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

Pablo Picasso

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

Pablo Picasso

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

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

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

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

Pablo Picasso

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

Pablo Picasso

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

Pablo Picasso