Painter Archives - Pictorial Quotes

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

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

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

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

Pablo Picasso

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

Pablo Picasso

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Pablo Picasso

We don’t grow older, we grow riper.

Pablo Picasso

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

Pablo Picasso

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Youth has no age.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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.

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

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

Pablo Picasso

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Pablo Picasso

The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

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

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

I do not seek. I find.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

It takes a long time to become young.

Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

Everything you can imagine is real.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

Pablo Picasso

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.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

Georgia O’Keeffe

It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

Georgia O’Keeffe

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.

Georgia O’Keeffe

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

Georgia O’Keeffe

One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

Georgia O’Keeffe

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Marks on paper are free – free speech – press – pictures all go together I suppose.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

Georgia O’Keeffe

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Georgia O’Keeffe

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

Georgia O’Keeffe

The days you work are the best days.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Anyone who doesn’t feel the crosses simply doesn’t get that country.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.

Claude Monet

There, the grand lines of mountain and sea are admirable, and apart from the exotic vegetation that is here, Monte Carlo is certainly the most beautiful spot of the entire coast: the motifs there are more complete, more picturelike, and consequently easier to execute.

Claude Monet

Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases.

Claude Monet

Finally here is a beautiful day, a superb sun like at Giverny. So I worked without stopping, for the tide at this moment is just as I need it for several motifs. This has bucked me up a bit.

Claude Monet

It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.

Claude Monet

For a long time, I have hoped for better days, but alas, today it is necessary for me to lose all hope. My poor wife suffers more and more. I do not think it is possible to be any weaker.

Claude Monet

I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.

Claude Monet

Among the seascapes, I am doing the regattas of Le Havre with many figures on the beach and the outer harbor covered with small sails.

Claude Monet

I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I’ve done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.

Claude Monet

I was definitely born under an evil star. I have just been thrown out of the inn where I was staying, naked as a worm.

Claude Monet

Try to forget what objects you have before you – a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

Claude Monet

I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.

Claude Monet

My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.

Claude Monet

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Claude Monet

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.

Claude Monet

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

Claude Monet

My life has been nothing but a failure.

Claude Monet

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Claude Monet

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

Claude Monet

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

Claude Monet

Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.

Claude Monet

I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.

Claude Monet

I am working, but when one has ceased to do seascape, it is the devil afterward – very difficult; it changes at every instant, and here the weather varies several times in the same day.

Claude Monet

I pass my time in the open air on the beach when it is really heavy weather or when the boats go out fishing.

Claude Monet

I will do water – beautiful, blue water.

Claude Monet

You have reached end of the world!

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