"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."
Read quote
52 likes
Quote collection
Pablo Picasso quotes (page 3 of 22)
437 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time."
Read quote
51 likes
"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."
Read quote
50 likes
"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."
Read quote
50 likes
"Sculpture is the art of the intelligence."
Read quote
50 likes
"Without great solitude no serious work is possible."
Read quote
50 likes
"When I haven't any blue I use red."
Read quote
49 likes
"Good artists copy, great artists steal."
Read quote
49 likes
"The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?"
Read quote
49 likes
"It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."
Read quote
49 likes
"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."
Read quote
48 likes
"A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody."
Read quote
48 likes
"You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve."
Read quote
45 likes
"...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."
Read quote
44 likes
"If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!"
Read quote
44 likes
"Go and do the things you can't. That is how you get to do them."
Read quote
44 likes
"The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child."
Read quote
44 likes
"One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail."
Read quote
43 likes
"Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?"
Read quote
43 likes
"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."
Read quote
42 likes