Pablo Picasso, a dominant figure in 20th-century art, is best known for pioneering Cubism and inventing collage.
Drawing influences from Paul Cézanne, Henri Rousseau and tribal art, Picasso restructured form and perspective, revolutionizing modern art.
His immersion in Cubism led to collage, seeing art as an arrangement of signs, not merely a window to the world.
Picasso’s artistic style was eclectic, moving between different styles interchangeably.
Encounters with Surrealism influenced his work, leading to the eroticism in portraits of his mistress, Marie-Therese Walter and the powerful anti-war painting “Guernica.” Picasso was keen to position himself in history, referencing past artists while redefining art.
Related: Gustav Klimt Quotes from the Austrian Painter and Vanessa Bell Quotes from the Famous English Painter
His late work dialogues with Old Masters like Ingres, Velazquez, Goya and Rembrandt, further cementing his legacy as an influential artist.
I have collected some of the finest quotes by Pablo Picasso for you.
Most Famous Pablo Picasso Quotes
1. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
2. “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
3. “Everything you can imagine is real.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
4. “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
5. “I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
6. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
7. “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
8. “Action is the foundational key to all success. ” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
9. “If I don’t have red, I use blue.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
10. “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
11. “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
12. “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
13. “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
14. “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
15. “The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
16. “If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
17. “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
18. “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
19. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
20. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
Popular Pablo Picasso Quotes
21. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
22. “My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
23. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
24. “I do not seek. I find.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
25. “Paradise is to love many things with a passion.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
26. “Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
27. “Don’t waste your youth growing up.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
28. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
29. “There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
30. “Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
31. “Youth has no age.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
32. “All Children are Artists.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
33. “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
34. “Lord, protect me from what I want!” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
35. “To draw you must close your eyes and sing.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
36. “The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
37. “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
38. “It takes a long time to become young.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
39. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
40. “There are more copies than originals among people.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
41. “The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
42. “Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
Top Pablo Picasso Quotes
43. “I am exhausted if I don’t work.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
44. “I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
45. “I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
46. “In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
47. “Sex and art are the same thing.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
48. “Through education comes understanding. Through understanding comes true appreciation. All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
49. “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
50. “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
51. “An artist must forget painting when he paints. That’s the only way he will do original work.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
52. “He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
53. “Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
54. “When it comes right down to it, all you have is yourself. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays…” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
55. “We are all born children- the trick is remaining one.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
56. “When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque, and I only allow my spirit to go in there and paint.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
57. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
Inspiring Pablo Picasso Quotes
58. “Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
59. “I don’t say everything, but I paint everything.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
60. “If you have five elements available, use only four. If you have four elements use three.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
61. “If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
62. “Computers are stupid.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
63. “If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn’t tell you.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
64. “While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
65. “When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
66. “We have learned nothing.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
67. “A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
Best Pablo Picasso Quotes
68. “People who read are people who dream.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
69. “I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
70. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
71. “The older you get the stronger the wind gets and it’s always in your face.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
72. “You don’t make art, you find it.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
73. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
Short Pablo Picasso Quotes
74. “I don’t develop; I am.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
75. “If it’s good, it’s mine. If it’s bad, it’s a fake.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
76. “To find is the thing.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
77. “Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
78. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
79. “If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
80. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
81. “Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it’s true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That’s what’s important.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
82. “Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
83. “Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
84. “Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
Profound Pablo Picasso Quotes
85. “Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
86. “Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
87. “Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
88. “When you’re really young, you’re young for life.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
89. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
90. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
91. “I consider a work of art as a product of calculations, calculations that are frequently unknown to the author himself.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
92. “What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
93. “Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
94. “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink any more.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
95. “For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
96. “Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
97. “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
98. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
99. “As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
100. “Basically the French are all peasants.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
101. “If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
102. “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
103. “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
104. “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
105. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
106. “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
107. “I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
108. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
109. “You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
110. “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
111. “The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
112. “All art is subversive.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
113. “I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
114. “What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
115. “Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
116. “One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
117. “A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
118. “Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
119. “Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one’s whole lifetime.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
120. “We don’t grow older, we grow riper.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
121. “Everything exists in limited quantity – especially happiness.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
122. “Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
123. “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.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
124. “If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.” ~ (Pablo Picasso).
