Pablo Picasso Quotes
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I don't think I'm wrong when I say that the most beautiful objects of the "stone age" were made of skin, fabric, and especially wood. The "stone age" ought to be called the "wood age." How many African statues are made of stone, bone, or ivory? Maybe one in a thousand! And prehistoric man had no more ivory at his disposal than African tribes. Maybe even less. He must have had thousands of wooden fetishes, all gone now.
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Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
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People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.
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If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.
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Action is the foundation of all success.
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Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.
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All art is subversive.
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Art is a leap into the dark.
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Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.
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In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be.
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Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.
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People don't realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it.
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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.
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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.
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When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.
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You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.
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I love bats! Women are scared of them. They think bats can get caught in their hair, don't they? But bats are the most beautiful of animals, extraordinarily delicate. Have you observed their brilliant little eyes, gleaming with intelligence, and their skin, silky as velvet? And look at all these delicate little bones.
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Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.
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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.
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They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.
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I have had no true friends, only lovers.
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I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.
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It's always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further.
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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!