Pablo Picasso Quotes

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

I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in my paintings. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them. I have never made trials nor experiments. Whenever I had something to say I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression. (Paris 1923)

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life

When I was a child 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.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

"Cansei de ser moderno. quero ser eterno".

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

If I don't have red, I use blue.

Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.

When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.