Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet, and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901-1904), the Rose Period (1904-1906), the African-influenced Period (1907-1909), Analytic Cubism (1909-1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.
Some of the best quotes from Pablo Picasso are listed below.
- “Accidents, try to change them – it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso
- “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” – Pablo Picasso
- “An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?” – Pablo Picasso
- “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
- “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Don’t waste your youth growing up.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
- “He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.” – Pablo Picasso
- “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso
- “I do not seek. I find.” – Pablo Picasso
- “I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.” – Pablo Picasso
- “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” – Pablo Picasso
- “I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso
- “It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other’s works more readily than we do in our own.” – Pablo Picasso
- “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.” – Pablo Picasso
- “It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.” – Pablo Picasso
- “It takes a long time to become young.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Love is the greatest refreshment in life.” – Pablo Picasso
- “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.” – Pablo Picasso
- “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
- “One must act in painting as in life, directly.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” – Pablo Picasso
- “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
- “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
- “People who read are people who dream.” – Pablo Picasso
- “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
- “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.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” – Pablo Picasso
- “There are more copies than originals among people.” – Pablo Picasso
- “There are only two types of women – goddesses and doormats.” – Pablo Picasso
- “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” – Pablo Picasso
- “There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.” – Pablo Picasso
- “To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.” – Pablo Picasso
- “To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.” – Pablo Picasso
- “We don’t grow older, we grow riper.” – Pablo Picasso
- “What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.” – Pablo Picasso
- “When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.” – Pablo Picasso
- “When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?” – Pablo Picasso
- “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Youth has no age.” – Pablo Picasso
