Pablo Picasso (born Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 1881 – 1973) was a brilliant Spanish painter and sculptor, born in Malaga, creator and representative of Cubism.

He considered himself a communist and was a tireless art worker, to the point of being internationally recognized as one of the most influential painters of the entire 20th century.

Phrases of Picasso (and famous quotes)

Coming from a family of artists, Pablo Picasso developed from an early age a special sense for art and painting . During his life he went through several stages in which he developed completely different styles, until he reached Cubism, which was his sign of identity.

In today’s article we will learn the best phrases of Pablo Picasso and several of his most representative famous quotes.

1. Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror or the painter?

A phrase in which he shows us a certain subjectivism when focusing on an artistic creation, or simply when visualizing reality.

2. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.

Love is more than just a matter of proportion.

3. We must not discriminate between things. As far as things are concerned, there are no class distinctions. We must choose what is good for us where we can find it.

Choose positively, but don’t discriminate.

4. When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they would ask ‘Did you do this? And I would say, ‘No, you did.

Picasso only captured it on the canvas.

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

The open mind does not understand labels or limits.

6. What is a face really? Your own photo? Your make-up? Or is it a face painted by a painter or another painter? Deformations simply don’t exist.

Another proof of the subjectivism that moved Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s work.

7. Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie’s ass.

Always emphasizing the privileges of the well-to-do classes.

8. To flourish, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.

Reinventing yourself is starting from scratch, without bias or preconceptions.

9. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but the application of what instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.

A phrase that sums up his creative mentality.

10. Manifestation takes place from the Spirit. It does not take place from the form, from the physical world. You must know that what you want to manifest will happen.

About the expressive nature.

11. To finish a work?… how absurd, to finish means to kill him, to free him from his soul… to give him the coup de grace for the painter and for the painting.

Everything is under constant construction. Art understands nothing else.

12. Having fun with all these games, all this nonsense, all these puzzles of images, I became famous… I am just a public artist who has understood his time.

A very interesting self-description.

13. Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions that are never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and within every photographer there is a painter who tries to get out.

Great thinking that may not please dentists and photographers…

14. I don’t believe in accidents. There are no encounters in history, there are no accidents.

Everything has a reason.

15. Often, when reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can feel the pleasure that comes from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep down in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

A parallelism between literature and painting.

16. What is more abstract may be the height of reality.

Paradoxical thought of the great Pablo Picasso.

17. When it comes down to it, all you have is your being. Your being is a sun with a thousand rays.

A way to express the necessary love for oneself.

18. If I spit, they’ll take my spit and frame it as a great work of art.

Aware of his popularity.

19. Matisse makes a drawing, then makes a copy of it. He copies it again five times, ten times, always clearing the line. He is convinced that the last one, the most stripped, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first one. In the draw, nothing is better than the first attempt.

Great reflection on art, by another brilliant painter.

20. Our goals can only be achieved through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must believe fervently, and on which we must act vigorously. There is no other route to success.

A motivating phrase like few others.

21. There is nothing more difficult than a line.

A design-based paradox.

22. You do a complete painting for a peach and people think otherwise, that that particular peach is just a detail.

The ironies of art interpretation.

23. I’m scared of people who talk about beautiful things. What is beautiful? Something that escapes definition.

24. Youth has no age.

It’s beyond the numbers.

25. Paradise is to love many things with passion.

Another of the aphorisms of this brilliant Spanish painter.

26. Nature does many things the way I do them, but she hides them!

Curious reflection on nature’s designs.

27. Is there anything more dangerous than empathic compression?

Connecting with someone has its risks.

28. An idea is a starting point and nothing more. As soon as you elaborate it, thought transforms it.

It’s a point from which the first lines are drawn.

29. When you begin to paint a portrait and look for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you inevitably arrive at the egg. In the same way, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one ends the portrait.

An observation on the creative process of painting.

30. Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working

Luck does not exist as something isolated; work favours its appearance.

31. Never allow a dichotomy to govern your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so that you can enjoy your free time. Look for a situation in which your work brings you as much happiness as your free time.

Another of Picasso’s phrases that have to do with our way of living life.

32. Everything exists in limited quantity, especially happiness.

Aphorism about what makes us happy.

33. Your job in life is your ultimate seduction.

A thought-provoking maxim of life.

34. Drawing is a kind of hypnotism.

It has a lot to do with suggestion.

35. I, who have been involved with all styles of painting, can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion that lead to snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.

Around art there is a crust that has little to do with its essence, according to Picasso.

36. Art is never chaste. It should be forbidden to the innocent ignorant; they should never be allowed contact with those who are not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. If art is chaste, it is not art.

It must have an experiential component.

37. Anything new, anything worth doing, cannot be recognized.

The real thing is rarely digestible by the general public.

38. Why suppose that to look is to see?

It may be something more related to emotions than to sensory information.

39. People who read are people who dream.

Knowing about other worlds leads to fantasy.

40. Music and art are the lights that guide the world.

Two ways to move mankind.

41. Museums are just a bunch of lies.

Nothing exists protected behind a glass case.

42. We constantly move dust from one place to another, only to have it replaced by more dust: entropy always wins.

Chaos is the rule, not the exception.

43. When I was a kid I used to draw like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a child.

Being creative means unlearning.

44. If we could get our brains out and use only our eyes…

A way of perceiving without rationalizing.

45. To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.

A way to get away from our surroundings.

46. What you might take for an early genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, he disappears without a trace. Perhaps it will happen that this child will become a real painter one day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to start all over again, from scratch.

About children’s creativity.

47. Unless your work is causing you trouble, it’s no good.

What has value is disruptive.

48. Sculpture is the best commentary a painter can make on his painting.

A cross between artistic modalities.

49. Imagination is real.

What we can imagine is part of what exists.

50. Copying others is necessary, but copying oneself is pathetic.

Trying to repeat oneself to create a personal brand is a way of limiting oneself.

51. In art, intentions are not enough and, as we say in Spanish, love must be demonstrated by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one intended to do.

What matters is the product of the action.

52. What I find horrible today is that people are always trying to find personality for themselves. No one cares about what you might call a painter’s ideal.

What makes us unique is not only reflected in our decisions.

53. It’s all a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in the bath like a lump of sugar.

Reality is full of extraordinary facts.

54. Now there is fame. Of all evils: hunger, misery, and the misunderstanding of the public; fame is by far the worst. It is God’s punishment for the artist. It is sad. It is true.

It can become a curse.

55. I don’t want to be modern. I want to be eternal.

The desire to transcend, a very typical characteristic of artists.

56. A piece of space dust falls on your head every day… With every breath, we inhale a little bit of the history of our universe, the past and future of our planet, the smells and stories of the world around us, even the seeds of life.

Our world is not limited to what we see.

57. I’d like to live like a poor man with a lot of money.

An apparent contradiction based on humility.

58. God is really just another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He doesn’t have a real style, he just keeps trying other things.

In nature there is a great variety of designs.

59. A plagiarist is someone who steals from a person. A true artist steals from everyone.

Art is not about having totally original ideas.

60. The Parthenon is actually a corral on which someone built a roof; and they added columns and sculptures because there were people in Athens who were working and wanted to express themselves.

Art as an improvised process.

61. When art critics meet, they talk about form, structure and meaning. When artists meet, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

A humorous reflection.

62. The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about. The more technique there is, the less there is.

The technique is like a rail that limits our movements.

63. You have to know how to be vulgar. Paint with four-letter words.

With the most rudimentary tools you can create wonders.

64. Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

By its nature, art is beyond reason.

65. Art is not true.

Mere representation of the real thing.

66. My hand tells me what I’m thinking.

The flow of thoughts into the hand… or the other way around?

67. No one pays attention if one always says the same things, with the same words and the same tone of voice.

You need to knock on the table to make yourself heard.

68. I understand how people see things in the roots of trees, in the crack of a wall, in an eroded stone. But in marble? It comes in blocks and doesn’t evoke any images. It doesn’t inspire anything.

Your opinion about this material so used in construction.

69. Painting is a blind man’s profession. The painter does not paint what he sees, but what he feels.

A task full of introspection.

70. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

The process of asking questions is, for this artist, the most interesting.

71. I’m not looking. I find.

Any situation involves fascinating discoveries.

72. The purpose of art is to wash away the dust of the daily life of our souls.

A practice that takes us beyond the everyday.

73. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

The art of painting reflects part of one’s identity and personal history.

74. The colours, with their characteristics, follow the changes of the emotions.

We cannot value colours without their emotional component.

75. The artist is a receptacle of emotions that come from everywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing form, from a spider’s web.

An original way of understanding the creative task of the artist.

76. You don’t make art, you find it.

Art comes to you. Great famous quote by Picasso.

77. Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

A question of prioritizing elements.

78. Love is the best refreshment in life.

Whoever feels loved is able to prolong his life.

79. All art is erotic.

The beauty embodied in Picasso’s paintings is a good example of this.

80. I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

The art is to reinterpret, never to copy.