Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a pioneering Spanish artist who revolutionized 20th-century art. Co-founder of Cubism, he is renowned for works like “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) and the powerful anti-war mural “Guernica” (1937). Picasso’s career unfolded through distinct periods, showcasing diverse styles and themes. Beyond painting, he delved into sculpture, ceramics, and other mediums, leaving an indelible mark on modern art. His innovative approach to form and representation continues to influence contemporary artists. Picasso’s works, housed in major museums and private collections globally, attest to his enduring legacy as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Pablo Picasso Quotes
1. “Everything you can imagine is real.”
— Pablo Picasso
2. “Action is the foundational key to all success. ”
— Pablo Picasso
3. “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
— Pablo Picasso
4. “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso
5. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
— Pablo Picasso
6. “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
— Pablo Picasso
7. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”
— Pablo Picasso
8. “I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
— Pablo Picasso
9. “If I don’t have red, I use blue.”
— Pablo Picasso
10. “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
— Pablo Picasso
11. “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ”
— Pablo Picasso
12. “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
— Pablo Picasso
13. “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
— Pablo Picasso
14. “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.”
— Pablo Picasso
15. “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.”
— Pablo Picasso
16. “The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
— Pablo Picasso
17. “If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”
— Pablo Picasso
18. “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
— Pablo Picasso
19. “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
20. “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
21. “There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.”
— Pablo Picasso
22. “We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”
— Pablo Picasso
23. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
— Pablo Picasso
24. “Don’t waste your youth growing up.”
— Pablo Picasso
25. “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
26. “I do not seek. I find.”
— Pablo Picasso
27. “There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.”
— Pablo Picasso
28. “Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.”
— Pablo Picasso
29. “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
— Pablo Picasso
30. “All Children are Artists.”
— Pablo Picasso
31. “Paradise is to love many things with a passion.”
— Pablo Picasso
32. “Youth has no age.”
— Pablo Picasso
33. “The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.”
— Pablo Picasso
34. “Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.”
— Pablo Picasso
35. “Lord, protect me from what I want!”
— Pablo Picasso
36. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
— Pablo Picasso
37. “There are more copies than originals among people.”
— Pablo Picasso
38. “It takes a long time to become young.”
— Pablo Picasso
39. “To draw you must close your eyes and sing.”
— Pablo Picasso
40. “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
— Pablo Picasso
41. “The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.”
— Pablo Picasso
42. “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
43. “I am exhausted if I don’t work.”
— Pablo Picasso
44. “Sex and art are the same thing.”
— Pablo Picasso
45. “In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.”
— Pablo Picasso
46. “Through education comes understanding. Through understanding comes true appreciation. All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
— Pablo Picasso
47. “I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.”
— Pablo Picasso
48. “I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.”
— Pablo Picasso
49. “He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”
— Pablo Picasso
50. “An artist must forget painting when he paints. That’s the only way he will do original work.”
— Pablo Picasso
51. “We are all born children- the trick is remaining one.”
— Pablo Picasso
52. “Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.”
— Pablo Picasso
53. “If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.”
— Pablo Picasso
54. “When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque, and I only allow my spirit to go in there and paint.”
— Pablo Picasso
55. “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
— Pablo Picasso
56. “When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays…”
— Pablo Picasso
57. “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.”
— Pablo Picasso
58. “If you’re stuck in a painting, then stop and draw something else. Draw a flower and put your love into that flower. Then your powers will come back again.”
— Pablo Picasso
59. “If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.”
— Pablo Picasso
60. “When I haven’t any blue I use red.”
— Pablo Picasso
61. “Computers are stupid.”
— Pablo Picasso
62. “People who read are people who dream.”
— Pablo Picasso
63. “We have learned nothing.”
— Pablo Picasso
64. “I don’t say everything, but I paint everything.”
— Pablo Picasso
65. “Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.”
— Pablo Picasso
66. “While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.”
— Pablo Picasso
67. “If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn’t tell you.”
— Pablo Picasso
68. “When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.”
— Pablo Picasso
69. “A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.”
— Pablo Picasso
70. “I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.”
— Pablo Picasso
71. “You don’t make art, you find it.”
— Pablo Picasso
72. “I don’t develop; I am.”
— Pablo Picasso
73. “Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”
— Pablo Picasso
74. “If it’s good, it’s mine. If it’s bad, it’s a fake.”
— Pablo Picasso
75. “To find is the thing.”
— Pablo Picasso
76. “Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?”
— Pablo Picasso
77. “The older you get the stronger the wind gets and it’s always in your face.”
— Pablo Picasso
78. “Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”
— Pablo Picasso
79. “Everyone wants to understand art. Why don’t we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.”
— Pablo Picasso
80. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.”
— Pablo Picasso
81. “If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?”
— Pablo Picasso
82. “I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who “appreciate” beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There’s no such thing. I never “appreciate,” any more than I “like.” I love it or I hate.”
— Pablo Picasso
83. “Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice.”
— Pablo Picasso
84. “Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.”
— Pablo Picasso
85. “When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
— Pablo Picasso
86. “Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.”
— Pablo Picasso
87. “Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it’s true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That’s what’s important.”
— Pablo Picasso
88. “Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.”
— Pablo Picasso
89. “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink any more.”
— Pablo Picasso
90. “Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?”
— Pablo Picasso
91. “Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”
— Pablo Picasso
92. “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”
— Pablo Picasso
93. “When you’re really young, you’re young for life.”
— Pablo Picasso
94. “I consider a work of art as a product of calculations, calculations that are frequently unknown to the author himself.”
— Pablo Picasso
95. “What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.”
— Pablo Picasso
96. “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
— Pablo Picasso
97. “If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.”
— Pablo Picasso
98. “People don’t realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it.”
— Pablo Picasso
99. “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
100. “Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.”
— Pablo Picasso
101. “For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography.”
— Pablo Picasso
102. “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
— Pablo Picasso
103. “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.”
— Pablo Picasso
104. “As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.”
— Pablo Picasso
105. “I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.”
— Pablo Picasso
106. “Basically the French are all peasants.”
— Pablo Picasso
107. “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”
— Pablo Picasso
108. “All art is subversive.”
— Pablo Picasso
109. “I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.”
— Pablo Picasso
110. “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
111. “What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.”
— Pablo Picasso
112. “If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.”
— Pablo Picasso
113. “You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.”
— Pablo Picasso
114. “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
115. “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
— Pablo Picasso
116. “Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It’s more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don’t quite know where it comes from.”
— Pablo Picasso
117. “Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?”
— Pablo Picasso
118. “The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”
— Pablo Picasso
119. “That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.”
— Pablo Picasso
120. “It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.”
— Pablo Picasso
121. “Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.”
— Pablo Picasso
122. “You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.”
— Pablo Picasso
123. “Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.”
— Pablo Picasso
124. “Everything exists in limited quantity – especially happiness.”
— Pablo Picasso
125. “We don’t grow older, we grow riper.”
— Pablo Picasso
126. “One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.”
— Pablo Picasso
127. “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
128. “A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.”
— Pablo Picasso
129. “Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one’s whole lifetime.”
— Pablo Picasso
130. “Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul.”
— Pablo Picasso
131. “I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.”
— Pablo Picasso
132. “I draw like other people bite their nails.”
— Pablo Picasso
133. “This idea of art for art’s sake is a hoax.”
— Pablo Picasso
134. “The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.”
— Pablo Picasso
135. “All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?”
— Pablo Picasso
136. “When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.”
— Pablo Picasso
137. “The path to youth takes a lifetime.”
— Pablo Picasso
138. “In art, practice always comes before theory.”
— Pablo Picasso
139. “Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.”
— Pablo Picasso
140. “Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.”
— Pablo Picasso
141. “There’s nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog, and that goes for women, too.”
— Pablo Picasso
142. “It’s a poor artist who borrows – a good artist steals.”
— Pablo Picasso
143. “I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.”
— Pablo Picasso
144. “For a long time I limited myself to one colour – as a form of discipline.”
— Pablo Picasso
145. “Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.”
— Pablo Picasso
146. “Manifesting takes place from Spirit. It doesn’t take place from form, from the physical world. You’ve got to know that what you want to manifest will occur.”
— Pablo Picasso
147. “It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.”
— Pablo Picasso
148. “It is important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We’ve got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on our time schedule.”
— Pablo Picasso
149. “In the end there is only Matisse.”
— Pablo Picasso
150. “For me, there are two kinds of women – goddesses and doormats.”
— Pablo Picasso
151. “I don’t work from nature, I work like nature.”
— Pablo Picasso
152. “When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.”
— Pablo Picasso
153. “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.”
— Pablo Picasso
154. “The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves.”
— Pablo Picasso
155. “Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.”
— Pablo Picasso
156. “When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.”
— Pablo Picasso
157. “A picture lives by its legend – not by anything else.”
— Pablo Picasso
158. “For being a bad student I was banished to the ‘calaboose’ – a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping.”
— Pablo Picasso
159. “The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.”
— Pablo Picasso
160. “To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.”
— Pablo Picasso
161. “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
162. “There’s nothing more difficult than a line.”
— Pablo Picasso
163. “You can’t run a without taking risks.”
— Pablo Picasso
164. “Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.”
— Pablo Picasso
165. “I have had no true friends, only lovers.”
— Pablo Picasso
166. “I’ve reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”
— Pablo Picasso
167. “It’s not what the artist does that counts; it’s what he is.”
— Pablo Picasso
168. “You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”
— Pablo Picasso
169. “Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.”
— Pablo Picasso
170. “Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!”
— Pablo Picasso
171. “People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.”
— Pablo Picasso
172. “Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance.”
— Pablo Picasso
173. “To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.”
— Pablo Picasso
174. “We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.”
— Pablo Picasso
175. “I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.”
— Pablo Picasso
176. “They’ll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.”
— Pablo Picasso
177. “From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.”
— Pablo Picasso
178. “I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.”
— Pablo Picasso
179. “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?”
— Pablo Picasso
180. “You can go to the moon or walk under the sea, or anything else you like, but painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation. It remains there like a question. And it alone gives the answer.”
— Pablo Picasso
181. “I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”
— Pablo Picasso
182. “People want to find a meaning in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age…”
— Pablo Picasso
183. “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
184. “Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
— Pablo Picasso
185. “A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it.”
— Pablo Picasso
186. “Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers – dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.”
— Pablo Picasso
187. “The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.”
— Pablo Picasso
188. “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
189. “I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.”
— Pablo Picasso
190. “I want to know one thing, what is color?”
— Pablo Picasso
191. “To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.”
— Pablo Picasso
192. “If I could say this I wouldn’t have to paint.”
— Pablo Picasso
193. “All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.”
— Pablo Picasso
194. “I’m a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.”
— Pablo Picasso
195. “The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.”
— Pablo Picasso
196. “A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.”
— Pablo Picasso
197. “I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don’t know nor can I do anything else.”
— Pablo Picasso
198. “When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.”
— Pablo Picasso
199. “What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.”
— Pablo Picasso
200. “Painting is a jeu d’esprit.”
— Pablo Picasso
