Top 300 Pablo Picasso Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

203. “Painting is a jeu d’esprit.”

— Pablo Picasso

204. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

205. “Something sacred, that’s it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is “touched by God.””

— Pablo Picasso

206. “I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.”

— Pablo Picasso

207. “I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.”

— Pablo Picasso

208. “To be young, really young, takes a very long time.”

— Pablo Picasso

209. “A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.”

— Pablo Picasso

210. “To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.”

— Pablo Picasso

211. “If there is something to steal, I steal it.”

— Pablo Picasso

212. “One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.”

— Pablo Picasso

213. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

214. “The earth doesn’t have a housekeeper to do the dusting.”

— Pablo Picasso

215. “Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized.”

— Pablo Picasso

216. “To model an object is to possess it.”

— Pablo Picasso

217. “Why assume that to look is to see?”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

219. “Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.”

— Pablo Picasso

220. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

221. “I imitate everyone except myself.”

— Pablo Picasso

222. “I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future.”

— Pablo Picasso

223. “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

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

— Pablo Picasso

225. “One must act in painting as in life, directly.”

— Pablo Picasso

226. “If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.”

— Pablo Picasso

227. “One cannot be a sorcerer all the time. How could one live?”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

229. “The more technique there is, the less there is.”

— Pablo Picasso

230. “It’s always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further...”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

232. “In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall.”

— Pablo Picasso

233. “I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get ‘green’ indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.”

— Pablo Picasso

234. “Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown.”

— Pablo Picasso

235. “My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.”

— Pablo Picasso

236. “When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?”

— Pablo Picasso

237. “Art isn’t done to decorate apartments, but to wage war against the enemy.”

— Pablo Picasso

238. “If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.”

— Pablo Picasso

239. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

240. “A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change.”

— Pablo Picasso

241. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

242. “Now there is fame! Of all – hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public – fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.”

— Pablo Picasso

243. “Even if the painting is green, well then! The ‘subject’ is the green. There is always a subject; it’s a joke to suppress the subject, it’s impossible.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

245. “Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects.”

— Pablo Picasso

246. “There’s no such thing as a bad Picasso, but some are less good than others.”

— Pablo Picasso

247. “Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.”

— Pablo Picasso

248. “Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it’s bidding.”

— Pablo Picasso

249. “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”

— Pablo Picasso

250. “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!”

— Pablo Picasso