Pablo Picasso Quotes

You have to wake people up! To revolutionize their way of identifying things...you've got to create images they won't accept.

Les bons artistes empruntent, les grands artistes volent.

Kažete da ste neshvaćeni mladi prijatelju.
Strpite se.
I dijamant je u osnovu ugljenik, ali je umeo da čeka.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions derived from anywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing figure, from a spider’s web. This is a spider's web. This is why one must not make a distinction between things. For them there are no aristocratic quarterings. One must take things where one finds them.

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

In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else

And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic point of view of life. (Paris 1923)

My mother said to me, if you are a soldier, you will became a general. If you are a monk will become the Pope. Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

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 be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

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].

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

My hand tells me what I’m thinking.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.

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.

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.