Creativity Quote by Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s line reads like an aesthetic manifesto disguised as social advice: stop ranking your raw material. The “must” is doing heavy work here, turning taste into discipline. He’s not pleading for open-mindedness as a virtue; he’s prescribing it as a survival tactic for making art. “Discriminate” normally signals discernment, but he flips it toward class prejudice, warning that the artist’s eye gets lazy when it inherits society’s snobberies.

The subtext is opportunistic in the best sense. “Pick out what is good for us where we can find it” isn’t altruism; it’s permission to loot the world. Picasso’s career is practically a catalog of this method: Iberian sculpture, African masks, children’s drawings, newspaper collage, cheap ceramics, café posters. High and low stop being moral categories and become a buffet. What matters is whether something can be made to yield form, friction, energy.

Context matters because Picasso is speaking from inside a century when “class distinctions” in culture were both rigid and cracking. Modernism depended on breaking academic hierarchies, but it also thrived in a market that rewarded novelty. This quote threads that needle: it justifies the shock of mixing “serious” art with the vernacular while defending the artist’s right to take from anywhere, not to represent “the people,” but to refresh the work.

It works rhetorically because it sounds egalitarian while staying intensely self-directed. The pronoun “us” quietly centers the artist’s appetite. Equality here isn’t politics; it’s a creative method that treats the world as usable.