Pablo Picasso

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.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

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.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

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

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

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.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

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

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

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

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

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.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

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

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

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

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.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

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.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Everything you can imagine is real.

We don't grow older, we grow riper.

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.