All Quotes

"Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books."

"Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality."

"To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged."

"The detective must be either the official representative of the ethical or the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace."

"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."

"Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return."

"The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish."

"All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am.""

"All pity is self-pity."

"In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, "I should like to hear some music," mean what they appear to mean, or merely, "At this moment I should like to forget myself." When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more difficult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true."

"Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind."

"Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist."

"To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."

"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."

"A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason."

"No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games."

"Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject."

"When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won."

"A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become."

"Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so."

"If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. ... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni."

"[A]lthough the sculpture made by painters is traditionally regarded as a way of giving material presence to two-dimensional imagery, Picasso was much more concerned with dematerilization, and the possibility of creating "non-space," in both mediums. This issue was especially germane to Picasso's sculpture, and it is also a crucial element of his Painter and Model. ...Picasso ...aspired to a very different type of spatial construction, literally creating a visual "nothingness." Such ideas were no longer Cubist ...but rather were ways of creating signs not simply for things but also for paradoxes—for contradictions as well as for assertions, for states of suspension and nonbeing as well as for being."

"Picasso said, “You can have all the perspectives at once!” What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested."

"Picasso - never at a loss for words: 'What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet...Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it... painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.'"

"I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso."

"I have in front of me photographs of all Picasso’s best works. The mere I admire them the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited! We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing."

"...they [Picasso and Georges Braque ] began working together, each understood and accepted the perspectival ambiguity implicit in Cézanne's colored planes, which they saw as acting simultaneously in two different positions: one an illusion, a colored equivalent for the position of the natural object in depth, the other actual, as an area for color on the surface of the picture."

"There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti."

"..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature.."

"Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso’s lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?"

"As a little female kid in Ohio, It was hard to identify with Picasso: his life with his babes And my life with my cat were rather different."

"even his signature is a work of art."

"incluso su firma es una obra de arte."

"When he [Picasso] paints as an cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fine and the result very strong. But those who imitate him achieve nothing worthwhile."

"Years later he [Picasso] would tell the French writer André Malraux of something else that shaped his [[w:Les Demoiselles d'Avignon|"

"Sexuality in art, Picasso’s included, is always an effect of representation: it is produced conventionally, through pictorial signs, and never traceable directly to the artist’s feelings or fantasies about particular women or woman in general. Picasso may be unremittingly macho in his life, but in his work, with rare exceptions, as in the period in the Thirties when he was obsessed with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter, his visual construction of gender is interestingly ambiguous."

"J. Robert Oppenheimer: [[w:Ernest_Lawrence|[Ernest] Lawrence]], you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx..."

"Picasso was one of my favorite studies."

"People see Picasso's Guernica. They don't know what that is really about. Guernica was the first bombing of an entire town. The United States backed the real bastards because they were all anti-Red."

"Picasso's great fresco is a monument to destruction, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius."

"Well some people try to pick up girls And get called assholes This never happened to Pablo Picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare and So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole"

"He's the greatest bull artist in the world—and only occasionally the greatest artist in the world."

"Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear."

"Picasso was telling Madame C-- that he could paint anywhere and anyhow. That nothing in the world could stop him. That even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit. He said he could paint then and there if he wanted to, or if he felt like it."

"Francis Newton Souza, "Paris Portrait - II" in"

"A friend built a modern house and he suggested that Picasso too should have one built. But, said Picasso, of course not, I want an old house. Imagine, he said, if Michelangelo would have been pleased if someone had given him a fine piece of Renaissance furniture, not at all."

"Picasso... the master... ...being a master: 'I don’t search, I find' ["Je ne cherche pas, je trouve"; a famous quote of Picasso, where he criticizes the 'searching' artists] ... the master, the mastery... ...Producing, producing... He [Picasso!] only knows how to work, can’t do anything else. What lost souls!... The great risk is producing for its own sake. You must never force things. You just have to wait."

"Almost 40 years ago [from 2006] a German official asked Pablo Picasso in front of his painting of the bombing that destroyed Guernica if he had done that. The artist replied, "No: You all did it."

"We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect."

"Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusion from other disciplines would compete unfairly for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research."