Georges Braque
Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.Collection: Art
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.Collection: Art
Art is made to disturb, science reassures.Collection: Art
Truth exists; only lies are invented.Collection: Truth
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.Collection: Poetry
There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.Collection: Art
To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.
Out of limitations, new forms emergeCollection: Form
Art is a wound turned into light.Collection: Art
Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.Collection: Mistake
In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.Collection: Unexpected
I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships.Collection: Believe
To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.Collection: Art
The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.Collection: Art
I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.Collection: Believe
The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.Collection: Art
What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space.Collection: Expression
Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better.Collection: Art
With age, art and life become one.Collection: Art
I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.Collection: Art
When objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909, this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.Collection: Space
I am much more interested in achieving unison with nature than in copying it.Collection: Copying
A painting without something disturbing in it – what's that?.Collection: Painting
Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.Collection: Communication
Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.Collection: Writing
I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.Collection: Believe
To work from nature is to improvise.Collection: Improvisation
Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.Collection: People
Never join an organization.Collection: Organization
I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same.Collection: Personality
I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong.Collection: Thinking
Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.Collection: Oval
One day I noticed that I could go on working my art motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me.Collection: Art
In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.Collection: Art
I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty.Collection: Beauty
You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does.Collection: Yellow
If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.Collection: Order
We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.Collection: Perpetual
The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.Collection: Art
Perspective starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye.Collection: Eye
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.Collection: Art
One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.Collection: Art
Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower.Collection: Flower
I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction.Collection: Personality
If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.Collection: Thinking
Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.Collection: Art
Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.Collection: Form
Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space.Collection: Space
Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.Collection: Simple
Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.Collection: Perfect