Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Francis Picabia

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French artist Francis Picabia.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

French - Artist | January 22, 1879 - November 30, 1953

Source: Wikipedia

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

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

God invented concubinage, satan marriage.

Francis Picabia

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Francis Picabia

My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

Francis Picabia

My ass contemplates those who talk behind my back.

Francis Picabia

Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.

Francis Picabia

The essence of a man is found in his faults.

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Francis Picabia

Only useless things are indispensable.

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

Good taste is as tiring as good company.

Francis Picabia

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Francis Picabia

The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

All beliefs are bald ideas.

Francis Picabia

Taste is tiring like good company.

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

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

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

Francis Picabia

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

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

Francis Picabia

You are always looking for already-felt emotions, just as you like to get an old pair of trousers back from the cleaners, which seem new when you don't look too closely. Artists are cleaners, don't let yourself be taken in by them. True modern works of art are made not by artists but quite simply by men.

Francis Picabia

If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirts.

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia

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

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

The future is a monotonous instrument

Francis Picabia

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

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

Francis Picabia

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

Francis Picabia