Picasso's most famous quotes
The top 3 according to 58 votes from people: I do not seek, I find. · Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants. · At their age I drew like Raphael, but it took me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.. (Updated Oct 19, 2025.)
"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.
Automatically translated (original in Français). See the original
Top 10
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1
I do not seek, I find.
Letter on art, Formes magazine, February 1930.
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2
Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants.
Written in a sketchbook, 27 March 1963.
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3
At their age I drew like Raphael, but it took me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.
At an exhibition of children's drawings.
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4
When I have no blue, I use red.
Reported by Paul Éluard, Donner à voir.
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5
Painting is never prose; it is poetry, written in verse with plastic rhymes.
Reported by Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1965).
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6
In drawing, nothing beats the first attempt.
Reported by Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso (1964).
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7
When I paint, my thinking is often a string of non sequiturs, a series of leaps from one peak to another.
Reported by Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1965).
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8
After all, a work of art is made not with ideas but with the hands.
Quoted in Picasso, Flammarion (1982).
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9
They tell me I paint like Raphael: fine. But since they know that, let them leave me alone when I do something else.
Writings on painters (1984).
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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.
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.
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