Pablo Picasso
There ought to be an absolute dictatorship... a dictatorship of painters... a dictatorship of one painter... to suppress all those who have betrayed us.Collection: Betrayed
The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting.Collection: Earth
Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.Collection: Running
Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.Collection: War
In art, practice always comes before theory.Collection: Art
Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.Collection: Mean
Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.Collection: Track
I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.Collection: Done
To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.Collection: Art
If you can imagine it...it is realCollection: Real
When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.Collection: Tired
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.Collection: Children
When they say that I am too old to make a thing, I try to make it immediately.Collection: Trying
The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it's for an intelligent reason. So it's really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You're better off acting capriciously.Collection: Intelligent
If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.Collection: Air
I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.Collection: Six Months
Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.Collection: Reality
People who read are people who dream.Collection: Dream
We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.Collection: Class Distinction
If I don't have red, I use blue.Collection: Inspirational
You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.Collection: Work
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.Collection: Song
I want to create a cat like the real cats I see crossing the streets, not like those you see in houses. They have nothing in common. The cat of the streets has bristling fur. It runs like a fiend, and if it looks at you, you think it is going to jump in your face.Collection: Running
If it's good, it's mine. If it's bad, it's a fake.Collection: Fake
I never calculate. That is why those who do, calculate so much less accurately than I.Collection: Art
[In developing your potential] ... I don't develop; I amCollection: Developing
There's no such thing as a bad Picasso, but some are less good than others.Collection: Goodness
It's insane how many Roman coins are being found! It's as if all Romans had holes in their pockets. They sowed coins wherever they went. Even in the fields. Maybe to grow money . . .Collection: Insane
Now there is fame! Of all - hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public - fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.Collection: Artist
I draw like other people bite their nails.Collection: Art
If I were to sign it now, I'd be committing forgery. I'd be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922.Collection: Signatures
I understand how you could see something in the root of a tree, a crack in the wall, in an eroded stone or pebble. But marble? It comes off in blocks and doesn't evoke any image. It does not inspire.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Art
This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.Collection: Art
The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves.Collection: People
The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.Collection: Art
I have a real passion for bones. I have many others in Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, dog's and sheep's heads. I even have a rhinoceros skull.Collection: Dog
If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.Collection: Ideas
Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.Collection: Heart
Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.Collection: Song
Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.Collection: Fall
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.Collection: Art
When there's dust missing here or there, it's because someone has touched my things. I see immediately someone has been there. And it's because I live constantly with dust, in dust, that I prefer to wear gray suits, the only color on which it leaves no trace.Collection: Dust
I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.Collection: Love
When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.Collection: Artist
To me there is no past or future in my 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 than it ever was.Collection: Art
When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.Collection: Beautiful
Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.Collection: Art
What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.Collection: Artist