Quotes from Pablo Picasso

The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

Paradise is to love many things with a passion.

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.

In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

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.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

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.

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.

I understand how you could see something in the root of a tree, a crack in the wall, in an eroded stone or pebble. But marble? It comes off in blocks and doesn't evoke any image. It does not inspire.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

I have had no true friends, only lovers.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

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

Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.

To find is the thing.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

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

Manifesting takes place from Spirit. It doesn't take place from form, from the physical world. You've got to know that what you want to manifest will occur.

It is important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We've got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on our time schedule.

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age...

Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.

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.