# Picasso's most famous quotes

"I do not seek, I find", painting being stronger than him, drawing like Raphael and then like a child: Pablo Picasso's most quoted lines, with the book or interview that reports them.

- 58 votes · 10 items
- Oct 19, 2025 · Nicolas L.
- https://even.best/en/l/4824/picasso-s-most-famous-quotes

## Top 10

1. **I do not seek, I find.** (8 · ▲8 ▼0) — Letter on art, Formes magazine, February 1930.
2. **Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants.** (6 · ▲7 ▼1) — Written in a sketchbook, 27 March 1963.
3. **At their age I drew like Raphael, but it took me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.** (5 · ▲6 ▼1) — At an exhibition of children's drawings.
4. **When I have no blue, I use red.** (5 · ▲5 ▼0) — Reported by Paul Éluard, Donner à voir.
5. **Painting is never prose; it is poetry, written in verse with plastic rhymes.** (5 · ▲5 ▼0) — Reported by Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1965).
6. **In drawing, nothing beats the first attempt.** (5 · ▲5 ▼0) — Reported by Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso (1964).
7. **When I paint, my thinking is often a string of non sequiturs, a series of leaps from one peak to another.** (5 · ▲5 ▼0) — Reported by Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1965).
8. **After all, a work of art is made not with ideas but with the hands.** (4 · ▲5 ▼1) — Quoted in Picasso, Flammarion (1982).
9. **They tell me I paint like Raphael: fine. But since they know that, let them leave me alone when I do something else.** (3 · ▲4 ▼1) — Writings on painters (1984).
10. **When I read a book on Einstein's physics that I don't understand at all, it doesn't matter: it will make me understand something else.** (0 · ▲2 ▼2) — Picasso, War and Peace (1954).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.