Quotes By Picasso

I’m posting this to my blog because I’m afraid I’ll lose this list…it was taken from Dan Scott’s Blog:

“Everything you can imagine is real.”

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

“It takes a very long time to become young.”

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”

“What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

“Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.”

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse… but surely you will see the wildness!”

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

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

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

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

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

“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.”

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

“I do not seek. I find.”

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

“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing”

“Youth has no age.”

“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.”

“If I don’t have red, I use blue.”

“People want to find a meaning in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age…”

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

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

“He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

“Action is the foundational key to all success.”

“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.”

“All art is erotic.”

“What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.”

“Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”

“Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.”

“Love is the greatest refreshment in life”

“We don’t grow older we grow riper.”

“Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.”

“You don’t make art, you find it”

“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions. ”

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”

“Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not melt in one’s bath.”

“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

“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.”

“Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized.”

“There is only one way to see things,
until someone shows us how to look at them
with different eyes”

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”

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

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

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”

“When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

“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 sun.”

“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.”

“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.”

“Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it’s bidding.”

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

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

“The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is. ”

“It took me a lifetime.”