All Time Famous Pablo Picasso Quotes

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