Pablo Picasso
169 quotes
Biography
"Sculpture is the art of the intelligence."
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
"Love is the greatest refreshment in life."
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."
"We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand."
"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."
"Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."
"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality."
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."
"The people who make art their business are mostly imposters."
"It takes a very long time to become young."
"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."
"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."
"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working."
"He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law."
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
"I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else."
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
"Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons... [Paris 1923]."
"When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes... [Paris 1923]."
"They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. Velasquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from what he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velasquez painted... [Paris 1923]."
"I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration."
"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. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything."