Pablo Picasso

1881 – 1973

I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

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

Good artists copy,
great artists steal.

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

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

There is no abstract art.
You must always start with something.
Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

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.

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.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

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.

Youth has no age.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Computers are useless.
They can only give you answers.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.

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.

I am always doing that which I cannot do,
in order that I may learn how to do it.

I do not seek. I find.

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

Action is the foundational key to all success.

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

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

It takes a long time to become young.

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

Others have seen what is and asked why.
I have seen what could be and asked why not.

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