Top 300 Pablo Picasso Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.”

— Pablo Picasso

252. “I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.”

— Pablo Picasso

253. “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.”

— Pablo Picasso

254. “If everyone would paint, political re-education would be unnecessary.”

— Pablo Picasso

255. “You mustn’t expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn’t interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.”

— Pablo Picasso

256. “An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.”

— Pablo Picasso

257. “When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.”

— Pablo Picasso

258. “Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?”

— Pablo Picasso

259. “When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.”

— Pablo Picasso

260. “An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.”

— Pablo Picasso

261. “It is personality with a penny’s worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.”

— Pablo Picasso

262. “One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.”

— Pablo Picasso

263. “Painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

267. “In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”

— Pablo Picasso

268. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

269. “The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.”

— Pablo Picasso

270. “They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.”

— Pablo Picasso

271. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

272. “And fame, for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated. I am rich.”

— Pablo Picasso

273. “For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart.”

— Pablo Picasso

274. “The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous.”

— Pablo Picasso

275. “The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

— Pablo Picasso

276. “You can’t escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you’re always in it.”

— Pablo Picasso

277. “When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.”

— Pablo Picasso

278. “As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes – and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done.”

— Pablo Picasso

279. “Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.”

— Pablo Picasso

280. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

281. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

282. “I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!”

— Pablo Picasso

283. “The only thing that’s important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.”

— Pablo Picasso

284. “In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

286. “The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.”

— Pablo Picasso

287. “Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.”

— Pablo Picasso

288. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

289. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

290. “I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things – they have to get along with one another.”

— Pablo Picasso

291. “Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It’s not interesting.”

— Pablo Picasso

292. “I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.”

— Pablo Picasso

293. “How often have I found that wanting to use blue, I didn’t have it so I used a red instead of the blue.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

295. “What I want is that my picture should evoke nothing but emotion.”

— Pablo Picasso

296. “I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them.”

— Pablo Picasso

297. “No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.”

— Pablo Picasso

298. “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.”

— Pablo Picasso

299. “We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso