Pablo Picasso Quotations | Page 3

You're either a goddess ... or a doormat.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone.

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

Go and do the things you can't. That is how you get to do them.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

I never calculate. That is why those who do, calculate so much less accurately than I.

You don't make art, you find it

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.

I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.

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

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

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.

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.

Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.

The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.

When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

To be young, really young, takes a very long time.

...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.

I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford.

Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.

There are more copies than originals among people.

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.

Lord, protect me from what I want!

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.

The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm.

That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.

Rhythm is a perception of time... when drawing, the tiredness of the hand is a rhythm.

If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?

Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the 'courage' to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age.

For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

There ought to be an absolute dictatorship... a dictatorship of painters... a dictatorship of one painter... to suppress all those who have betrayed us...

A picture lives by its legend - not by anything else.

For my part, I can't do anything else but what I am doing.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

In the end there is only Matisse.

I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.

Computers are stupid.

I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.

To model an object is to possess it.

Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.

Art is lies that tell the truth.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; 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.

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.

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.

The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless.

Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

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.

Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

The only pictorial matter that is of interest to me is the matter and sentiments brought about by the work itself.

You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it's absolutely steady, and much more exciting.

If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.

All art is subversive.

When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few... if you are lucky.

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.

What I find horrible nowadays is that people are always trying to find a personality for themselves. Nobody bothers about what you might call a painter's ideal... the kind that's always existed... No. They couldn't care less about that.

There's no such thing as a bad Picasso, but some are less good than others.

A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.

The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be.

I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.

All Children are Artists

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude.

I paint what I think, not what I see.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies 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.

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.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.

We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.

I would like to live like a poor person with a lot of money.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

I am exhausted if I don't work.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.

They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.

Action is the fundamental key to success.