Pablo Picasso
You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.Collection: Sides
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.Collection: Flower
The path to youth takes a lifetime.Collection: Mastery
Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.Collection: Chess
Lord, protect me from what I want!Collection: Want
I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them.Collection: Eye
The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.Collection: Inspirational
Good taste is the enemy of creativity.Collection: Creativity
You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.Collection: Reality
What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.Collection: Doe
When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?'. And I'd say, 'No, you did.'Collection: Soldier
...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.Collection: Freedom
The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.Collection: Creative
Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.Collection: Facts
Sex and art are the same thing.Collection: Art
All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.Collection: Art
Manifesting takes place from Spirit. It doesn't take place from form, from the physical world. You've got to know that what you want to manifest will occur.Collection: World
...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.Collection: Art
Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don’t quite know where it comes from.Collection: Reality
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.Collection: Song
The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.Collection: Past
Why assume that to look is to see?Collection: Looks
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.Collection: Art
Computers are useless - all they can give you are answers.Collection: Giving
Art is lies that tell the truth.Collection: Art
That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.Collection: Inspiration
I do things I don't know how to do in order to learn how to do them.Collection: Order
Paradise is to love many things with a passion.Collection: Passion
I paint what I think, not what I see.Collection: Art
People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age...Collection: People
To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.Collection: Reality
You don't make art, you find itCollection: Art
Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.Collection: Reality
When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays.Collection: Yoga
In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.Collection: Photography
Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance.Collection: Character
We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.Collection: Art
Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.Collection: Mean
If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.Collection: Success
I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.Collection: Know Yourself
For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apartCollection: Reality
I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.Collection: Feelings
Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.Collection: Artist
If there is something to steal, I steal it.Collection: Stealing
Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.Collection: Art
In one way or another, I always marked my pictures. But there were times when I put my signature on the back of the canvas. All my works from the cubist period, until about 1914, have my name and the date on the back side of the stretcher. I know someone spread the story that in Céret, Braque and I decided not to sign our pictures anymore. But that's just a legend!Collection: Names
I hate it when people pilfer my things.Collection: Hate
You're either a goddess ... or a doormat.Collection: Goddess