Creativity Quote by Francis Picabia

Picabia lands a dagger in the soft tissue of modern self-mythology: the idea that what distinguishes us is talent, virtue, class, taste. Strip the costumes away, he suggests, and the real hierarchy is suffering, graded like a cruel social exam. Coming from an artist who moved through Cubism, Dada, and perpetual reinvention, the line reads less like a sentimental plea for empathy and more like a sideways laugh at how seriously we take our differences.

The phrasing "maybe" matters. It’s not a creed; it’s a provocation, a shrug that doubles as a challenge. Dada distrusted grand explanations, and this sentence carries that anti-system posture: it reduces human separation to one blunt variable, then leaves you to sit with how plausible (and how insulting) that reduction feels. Misery here isn’t just personal sadness; it’s the engine of comparison, the thing we privately measure while publicly performing distinction. If everyone hurts, then status becomes an argument about whose pain counts, whose is refined, whose is invisible.

Historically, Picabia lived through mechanized war and the rise of mass culture, eras that made individuality feel both louder and more disposable. The subtext is that modern life doesn’t unite us through progress; it standardizes us through damage. The line works because it’s both bleak and egalitarian: not "we are all the same", but "we are all compromised" - and the only real distance between us is how much.