Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter and one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Associated primarily with ground-breaking and game-changing Cubism, alongside Georges Braque, Picasso also made substantial contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism.
When he was born, Picasso was such a weak baby that the midwife thought that he was dead and left him on a table to attend his mother. His uncle, a doctor named Don Salvador, was the one that saved him.
Doctors at that time used to smoke big cigars, and my uncle was no exception. When he saw me lying there he blew smoke into my face. To this I immediately reacted with a grimace and a bellow of fury – Picasso once said.
He was a rebel from the start and soon moved from Spain to Paris where he soaked up the works of Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose sketchy style impressed him immensely. Before he struck upon Cubism, Picasso went through a number of styles – realism, caricature, the Blue Period, and the Rose Period. Inspired by French artist Paul Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque started painting landscapes in the style that critics later called “bizarreries cubiques” (cubic oddities), which gave the movement name Cubism. Picasso was a pioneer with a hand in every art movement of the century.
However, he is not only famous for his work – but he was also an incorrigible womanizer. The extraordinary energy which he devoted to his oeuvre can only be matched by the energy with wich he pursued women. They were often his muses who inspired him to create his masterpieces.
Here are some of the most powerful and inspirational Pablo Picasso quotes on art, painters, meaning of life, creativity, and individuality.
1. ON art
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Pablo Picasso
•
To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules. – Pablo Picasso
•
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. – Pablo Picasso
•
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. – Pablo Picasso
•
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird? – Pablo Picasso
•
The people who make art their business are mostly imposters. – Pablo Picasso
•
Music and art are the guiding lights of the world. – Pablo Picasso
2. ON PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. – Pablo Picasso
•
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. – Pablo Picasso
•
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. – Pablo Picasso
•
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt. – Pablo Picasso
•
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. – Pablo Picasso
3. ON himself
When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid. – Pablo Picasso
•
I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don’t know nor can I do anything else. – Pablo Picasso
•
If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur. – Pablo Picasso
•
As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes – and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done. – Pablo Picasso
•
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. – Pablo Picasso
•
Give me a museum and I’ll fill it. – Pablo Picasso
•
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. – Pablo Picasso
•
The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? – Pablo Picasso
•
For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography. – Pablo Picasso
•
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. – Pablo Picasso
•
If it’s good, it’s mine. If it’s bad, it’s a fake. – Pablo Picasso
4. ON women
For me, there are two kinds of women – goddesses and doormats. – Pablo Picasso
5. ON people
People want to find a meaning in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age… Pablo Picasso
6. ON life
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. – Pablo Picasso
•
The first half of life is learning to be an adult – the second half is learning to be a child. – Pablo Picasso
•
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. – Pablo Picasso
7. ON PHOTOGRAPHerS
Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out. – Pablo Picasso
8. ON FAME
The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous… I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. – Pablo Picasso
•
Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown. – Pablo Picasso
•
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art. – Pablo Picasso
9. ON INSPIRATION AND PERFECTION
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. – Pablo Picasso
•
It’s always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further… – Pablo Picasso
•
It is important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We’ve got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on our time schedule. – Pablo Picasso
10. ON solitude
Without great solitude no serious work is possible. – Pablo Picasso
11. ON god
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. – Pablo Picasso
12. ON computers
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. – Pablo Picasso
13. ON SUCCESS AND TAKING ACTION
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. – Pablo Picasso
•
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility. – Pablo Picasso
•
Action is the foundational key to all success. – Pablo Picasso
•
He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law. – Pablo Picasso
•
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. – Pablo Picasso
•
What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing. – Pablo Picasso
•
To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.
•
Everything we can dream can be real. – Pablo Picasso
14. ON creativity and originality
Good artists copy, great artists steal. – Pablo Picasso
•
To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic. – Pablo Picasso
•
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. – Pablo Picasso
•
The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense. – Pablo Picasso
•
There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes. – Pablo Picasso
•
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. – Pablo Picasso
•
It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction. – Pablo Picasso
15. ON CREATION
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. – Pablo Picasso
•
The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all. – Pablo Picasso
•
If you know exactly what you’re going to do, what’s the good in doing it? – Pablo Picasso
•
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. – Pablo Picasso
•
Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good. – Pablo Picasso
16. ON learning new things
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. – Pablo Picasso
17. ON BEAUTY AND GOOD TASTE
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness. – Pablo Picasso
•
Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to. – 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. – Pablo Picasso
Did you know?
If you liked best Pablo Picasso quotes, here are some interesting trivia about his life.
Pablo Picasso was a child prodigy and it was his father Ruiz, an artist and art professor, who recognized Pablo’s amazing talent. His first word was “piz”, what is short of “lápiz”, a Spanish word for “pencil”, by the age of 9, he had finished his first painting, and when he was 13, his father decided he would give up painting because he felt his son already had surpassed him.
In 1911. Pablo Picasso was questioned by the police on whether he stole Mona Lisa. When the famous painting was stolen from the Louvre, the police took in Picasso’s friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who fingered Picasso as a suspect. Both were later released.
