Francis Picabia Quotations

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Good taste is as tiring as good company.

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

My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

My ass contemplates those who talk behind my back.

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

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

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

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

Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.

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

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

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

The essence of a man is found in his faults.

The future is a monotonous instrument

All beliefs are bald ideas.

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Only useless things are indispensable.

Taste is tiring like good company.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

God invented concubinage, Satan marriage.

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