Famous Quotes - Pablo Picasso

Famous Quotes

Pablo Picasso

On the Nature of Art

• "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
• "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."
• "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."
• "Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
• "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."
• "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality."
• "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."

On Creativity and Inspiration

• "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."
• "The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense."
• "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
• "The action itself creates the idea."
• "An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought."
• "I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else."
• "You must force the muse to show up."

On Youth and Growth

• "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
• "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."
• "It takes a long time to become young."
• "Youth has no age."
• "We don't grow older, we grow riper."

On Success and Action

• "Action is the foundational key to all success."
• "Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success."
• "He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law."
• "If you only work when you feel like it, you will never build anything of substance."

On Life and Philosophy

• "Everything you can imagine is real."
• "Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar."
• "Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions."
• "Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."
• "I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."
• "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
• "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 end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."