Top 300 Pablo Picasso Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “I don’t work from nature, I work like nature.”

— Pablo Picasso

153. “When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.”

— Pablo Picasso

154. “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.”

— Pablo Picasso

155. “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

156. “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

157. “A picture lives by its legend – not by anything else.”

— Pablo Picasso

158. “To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.”

— Pablo Picasso

159. “The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.”

— Pablo Picasso

160. “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

161. “There’s nothing more difficult than a line.”

— Pablo Picasso

162. “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

163. “You can’t run a without taking risks.”

— Pablo Picasso

164. “Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.”

— Pablo Picasso

165. “To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.”

— Pablo Picasso

166. “I have had no true friends, only lovers.”

— Pablo Picasso

167. “I’ve reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”

— Pablo Picasso

168. “It’s not what the artist does that counts; it’s what he is.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

170. “Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.”

— 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. “Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!”

— Pablo Picasso

173. “Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance.”

— Pablo Picasso

174. “To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.”

— Pablo Picasso

175. “We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.”

— Pablo Picasso

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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. “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?”

— Pablo Picasso

182. “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

183. “Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

— Pablo Picasso

184. “People want to find a meaning in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age...”

— Pablo Picasso

185. “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

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

— Pablo Picasso

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Pablo Picasso

190. “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

191. “I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.”

— Pablo Picasso

192. “I want to know one thing, what is color?”

— Pablo Picasso

193. “If I could say this I wouldn’t have to paint.”

— Pablo Picasso

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Pablo Picasso

197. “A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

199. “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

200. “What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.”

— Pablo Picasso