Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like Guernica and for the art movement known as Cubism. A Spanish painter, he was also a sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer considered one of the greatest and most influential creative force in the 20th century. Picasso is credited, along with Georges Braque, with the creation of Cubism.
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These are among his most memorable observations.
o He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
o I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
o Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
o I do not seek. I find.
o There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
o I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
o Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
o Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
o All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
o 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.
o Youth has no age.
o Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
NOTE: Stolen from George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
o Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
o To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
o I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
o I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
o It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
o The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
o We don’t grow older, we grow riper.
o You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
o There are only two types of women – goddesses and doormats.
o It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
o The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.
o Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
o 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.
o To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.
o Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
o The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
o It takes a long time to become young.
o 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.
o The older you get the stronger the wind gets – and it’s always in your face.
o Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
o The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
o It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
o 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.
o Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
o Everything you can imagine is real.
o Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
o Action is the foundational key to all success.
o All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once grown up.
o An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by reflection.
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