Pablo Picasso

My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

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

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

I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.

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

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

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.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford.

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

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.

Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.

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.

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.

They'll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.

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.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

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.