67 Pablo Picasso Quotes on Art, Life, and Creativity
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (born 25 October 1881, Málaga, Spain – died 8 April 1973, Mougins, France) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramicist, printmaker, and stage designer. He is well known as the creator, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. Pablo Picasso is considered to be one of the most-influential artists of the 20th century.
Action is the foundational key to all success.Everything you can imagine is real.Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.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.The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.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.Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.If you don’t know what color to take, take black.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.Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?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.Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.It takes a long time to become young.Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.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.Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.Accidents, try to change them – it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.The older you get the stronger the wind gets and it’s always in your face.The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.When I haven’t any blue I use red.It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.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.
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.
Pablo Picasso
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.If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!There are only two types of women: goddesses and doormats.Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.Without great solitude no serious work is possible.It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. 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
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.Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It’s a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live, but primarily so that he can realize his work.To draw you must close your eyes and sing.An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.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.I do not seek. I find.Youth has no age.Of course, you can paint pictures by matching up different parts of them so that they go nicely together, but they’ll lack any kind of drama.People want to find a meaning in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age.People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.
