Picabia Quotes

#1. Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify.

Francis Picabia

#2. Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed.

Francis Picabia

#3. Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.

Francis Picabia

#4. Youth doesn't reason, it acts. The old man reasons and would like to make the others act in his place.

Francis Picabia

#5. Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.

Francis Picabia

#6. We are not responsible for what we do; we are ignorant of our acts until we accomplish them.

Francis Picabia

#7. The essence of a man is found in his faults.

Francis Picabia

#8. Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.

Francis Picabia

#9. Knowledge is an old error remembering its youth

Francis Picabia

#10. The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Francis Picabia

#11. Dada talks with you, it is everything, it includes everything, it belongs to all religions, can be neither victory nor defeat, it lives in space and not in time.

Francis Picabia

#12. If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.

Francis Picabia

#13. One must go through life, be it red or blue, stark naked and accompanied by the music of a subtle fisherman, prepared at all times for a celebration.

Francis Picabia

#14. Picabia is a very old painter who some people try to connect me to, but I refuse such comparisons very well.

Sigmar Polke

#15. Cubism is a Cathedral of shit.

Francis Picabia

#16. Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction.

Francis Picabia

#17. My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

Francis Picabia

#18. Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

Francis Picabia

#19. The devil follows me day and night because he is afraid to be alone.

Francis Picabia

#20. All the painters who appear in our museums are
failures at painting; the only people ever talked
about are failures; the world is divided into two
categories of people: failures and those unknown.

Francis Picabia

#21. What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Peter Doig

#22. Taste is tiring like good company.

Francis Picabia

#23. Only useless things are indispensable.

Francis Picabia

#24. Dada is like your hopes: nothing like your paradise: nothing like your idols: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artists: nothing like your religions: nothing

Francis Picabia

#25. There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

David Bowie

#26. The only way to win is to fight on the side of your adversaries.

Francis Picabia

#27. A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Francis Picabia

#28. Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Francis Picabia

#29. All beliefs are bald ideas.

Francis Picabia

#30. Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.

Francis Picabia

#31. My painting is a contest
between life and sleep.

Francis Picabia

#32. Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Francis Picabia

#33. Good taste is as tiring as good company.

Francis Picabia

#34. A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.

Francis Picabia

#35. Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men.

Francis Picabia

#36. New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.

Francis Picabia