140 Pablo Picasso Quotes That Spark Greatness in Life

Check out these 140 Pablo Picasso quotes to help you establish new paths to success!

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest Spanish artists who ever lived. He became a leading painter during the Cubism movement, an influential avant-garde art movement.

His imagination, boldness, creativity, and work ethic continue to have a powerful impact on the world to this day. The way he lived his life to the fullest continues to teach us a lot.

Start reading here.

Best Pablo Picasso Quotes

1. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

2. “Everything you can imagine is real.”

3. “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”

4. “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

5. “Action is the foundational key to all success.”

6. “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

7. “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”

8. “It takes a very long time to become young.”

9. “I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.”

10. “Youth has no age.”

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

12. “Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.”

13. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

14. “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

15. “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

Related: Jean-Michel Basquiat Quotes

Famous Pablo Picasso Quotes

16. “The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.”

17. “The older you get, the stronger the wind gets, and it’s always in your face.”

18. “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”

19. “It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.”

20. “An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.”

21. “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.”

22. “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.”

23. “The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”

24. “He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

25. “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.”

26. “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”

27. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

28. “I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.”

29. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

30. “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.”

Inspirational Pablo Picasso Quotes

31. “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

32. “I do not seek. I find.”

33. “Love is the greatest refreshment in life.”

34. “I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.”

35. “Every now and then, one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.”

36. “Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.”

37. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

38. “We don’t grow older, we grow riper.”

39. “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”

40. “There is only one way to see things until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.”

41. “You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.”

42. “Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.”

43. “The name a person bears or adopts has its importance.”

44. “People who read are people who dream.”

45. “Don’t waste your youth growing up.”

Pablo Picasso Quotes on Being an Artist

46. “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.”

47. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

48. “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

49. “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.”

50. “One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite else. It is remarkable how little the ‘willing’ of the artist intervenes.”

51. “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.”

52. “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.”

53. “People think that I painted the pictures of bullfights in those days after they were over. Not at all. I painted them the day before and sold them to anyone so as to have enough money to buy a ticket.”

54. “People are always asking me to sign my old canvases. It’s ridiculous! In one way or another, I always marked my pictures.”

55. “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”

56. “Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?”

57. “I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.”

58. “While I am working, I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.”

59. “If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse—but surely you will see the wildness!”

60. “When I haven’t any blue, I use red.”

Pablo Picasso Quotes That Talk About Art and Life

61. “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.”

62. “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality.”

63. “One must act in painting as in life, directly.”

64. “This idea of art for art’s sake is a hoax.”

65. “People want to find a meaning in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age.”

66. “The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.”

67. “You don’t make art, you find it.”

68. “Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.”

69. “There’s nothing more difficult than a line.”

70. “Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do its bidding.”

71. “All art is erotic.”

72. “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”

73. “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.”

74. “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

75. “Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.”

Heavy Pablo Picasso Quotes That Will Expand Your Imagination

76. “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

77. “What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”

78. “To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.”

79. “A picture lives by its legend—not by anything else.”

80. “A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change.”

81. “Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”

82. “Accidents, try to change them—it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.”

83. “Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized.”

84. “If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”

85. “Nothing is worse than a brilliant beginning.”

86. “I made a face and began to cry.”

87. “There are only two types of women—goddesses and doormats.”

88. “Every positive value has its price in negative terms—the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”

89. “Who sees the human face correctly—the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?”

90. “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

Poetic Pablo Picasso Quotes to Ponder On

91. “It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues. 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.”

92. “Success is dangerous.”

93. “Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood.”

94. “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?”

95. “To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow, the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.”

96. “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.”

97. “Man doesn’t change. He keeps his habits.”

98. “The first half of life is learning to be an adult. The second half is learning to be a child.”

99. “A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.”

100. “If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.”

101. “Paradise is to love many things with a passion.”

102. “We are all born children—the trick is remaining one.”

103. “Races and religions may have changed, but the marketplace, the living quarters, pilgrimage sites, places of worship, have remained the same.”

104. “The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.”

105. “How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly?”

Great Pablo Picasso Quotes That You’ll Never Forget

106. “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.”

107. “Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.”

108. “Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.”

109. “Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.”

110. “To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.”

111. “Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.”

112. “Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world.”

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

114. “A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.”

115. “Lord, protect me from what I want!”

116. “A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.”

117. “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.”

118. “If you don’t know what color to take, take black.”

119. “I don’t work from nature, I work like nature.”

120. “In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.”

Pablo Picasso Quotes That You’ll Enjoy

121. “The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.”

122. “It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It’s a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live but primarily so that he can realize his work.”

123. “People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”

124. “You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”

125. “The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is. ”

126. “Sex and art are the same thing.”

127. “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it—myself included.”

128. “Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”

129. “I’m not a developer; I am.”

130. “The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing.”

More Pablo Picasso Quotes

131. “I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist.”

132. “When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo.”

133. “We have learned nothing in 12,000 years.”

134. “Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.”

135. “When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.”

136. “My hand tells me what I’m thinking.”

137. “We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it’s all gone.”

138. “It would be very interesting to preserve photographically not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream.”

139. “We’re constantly moving dust from one place to another, only to have it replaced by more dust—entropy always wins.”

140. “You have to know how to be vulgar. Paint with four-letter words.”

In What Ways Did These Quotes Motivate You to Take Action Toward Your Goals?

We must take action and move forward to pursue our dreams and aspirations in life. Use what you have, find inspiration, get started, and make the most of it.

Pablo Picasso was a man who knew how to live life to the fullest. When he discovered his passion and desire for art, he pursued it wholeheartedly.

This man taught us to follow our passions, pay attention, leave a legacy that inspires others, and learn to love our flaws. We hope that you can go your own way so that you can live the life you desire!

Have you been inspired by our collection? Which quotes are your favorites? Please, leave a comment below.

Read Next:

Karen Danao

Hi, I’m Karen, a content curator and writer for Quote Ambition; I’m also a marketing and advertising professional. Beyond the keyboard and the screen, I’m someone who’s out to enjoy every bit that life has to offer!

Poetry, philosophy, history, and movies are all topics I love writing about! However, my true passion is in traveling, photography, and finding common ground to which everyone from different cultures can relate.

With the many places I’ve been to, I found that love, inspiration, and happiness are some things that bring people together. No matter how different we are on the outside, I’m a true believer that our emotions don’t lie; if you dig deep into our psyche, we’re all the same inside.

This belief was further amplified when I joined Quote Ambition. Through the quotes I’ve read, collected, organized, and written about, I found that humans are resilient, creative, and compassionate.

We take from each others’ hearts and courage, and it’s through our individual experiences that we learn how to rise above our challenges and pain. In so many ways, Quote Ambition is a platform that allows people from all over the world to gain the inspiration they need anytime, anywhere!

You can find me on MuckRack and LinkedIn.