Quotes from True Genius: Pablo Picasso

Accidents, try to change them it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

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

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

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

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

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

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

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

I do not seek. I find.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

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

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

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

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

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

It takes a long time to become young.

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

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

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.

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

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

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

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.

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.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

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

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

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

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.

The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

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

The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

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

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

There are only two types of women - goddesses and doormats.

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

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

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

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.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

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 to us to understand.

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

We don't grow older, we grow riper.

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

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.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

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

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.

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

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

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

Youth has no age.

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.