Georgia O’Keeffe, born in 1887, was an influential American artist known for her innovative depictions of natural forms and landscapes. Emerging as a prominent figure in the American modernist movement, O’Keeffe’s work captivated audiences with its bold colors, dramatic compositions, and sensual imagery.
Her paintings often featured close-up views of flowers, particularly her famous “Jimson Weed” series, as well as expansive landscapes of the American Southwest, where she lived and worked for much of her life. Through her art, O’Keeffe sought to convey the essence of the natural world, capturing its beauty and power with a unique vision.
O’Keeffe’s independent spirit and strong sense of self made her an iconic figure in American art and culture. She challenged traditional gender roles and paved the way for future generations of female artists.
Despite facing challenges and setbacks throughout her career, O’Keeffe remained dedicated to her artistic vision, leaving behind a rich and enduring legacy. Her work continues to inspire and influence artists around the world, reaffirming her status as one of the most important figures in 20th-century American art.
Georgia O’Keeffe Quotes
1. “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
2. “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
3. “I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
4. “It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
5. “To make your unknown known – that’s the important thing.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
6. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
7. “Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
8. “Happiness goes like the wind, but what is interesting stays.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
9. “Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
10. “Filling a space in a beautiful way – that is what art means to me.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
11. “You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
12. “Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
13. “I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
14. “One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
15. “The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
16. “I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it-how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that, the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
17. “You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
18. “I’m frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
19. “I don’t see why we ever think of what others think of what we do – no matter who they are. Isn’t it enough just to express yourself?”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
20. “There’s something about black. You feel hidden away in it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
21. “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
22. “A week ago it was the mountains I thought the most wonderful, and today it’s the plains. I guess it’s the feeling of bigness in both that carries me away.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
23. “Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
24. “When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they’re really thinking about their own affairs.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
25. “The days you work are the best days.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
26. “I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
27. “Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
28. “Someone else’s vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it ’cause in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
29. “The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
30. “I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
31. “If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
32. “God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
33. “I do not like the idea of happiness – it is too momentary – I would say that I was always busy and interested in something – interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
34. “It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
35. “I don’t know what Art is but I know some things it isn’t when I see them.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
36. “When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I’m gone.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
37. “I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
38. “I decided to accept as true my own thinking.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
39. “My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
40. “So I said to myself-I’ll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
41. “Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
42. “To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
43. “Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
44. “Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
45. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
46. “I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
47. “I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
48. “In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
49. “All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands…”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
50. “I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
51. “I’ve been afraid every single day of my life, but I’ve gone ahead and done it anyway.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
52. “Come quickly. You mustn’t miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
53. “My first memory is of light – the brightness of light – light all around.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
54. “I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things – I hate to show them – I am perfectly inconsistent about it – I am afraid people won’t understand – and I hope they won’t – and am afraid they will.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
55. “The meaning of a word – to me – is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
56. “It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
57. “I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
58. “It always seems to me that so few people live – they just seem to exist and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t live always – til we die physically…”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
59. “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
60. “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
61. “I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
62. “I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
63. “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
64. “If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
65. “One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going…”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
66. “I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught – not like what I had seen – shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
67. “It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
68. “Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
69. “Marks on paper are free – free speech – press – pictures all go together I suppose.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
70. “I find that I have painted my life – things happening in my life – without knowing.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
71. “It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
72. “When you get so that you can’t see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn’t come by it gradually, I guess you’d just kill yourself when you couldn’t see.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
73. “Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
74. “I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
75. “I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
76. “As one chooses between the country and the human being, the country becomes much more wonderful.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
77. “War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness – if he had it he wouldn’t be a good soldier.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
78. “I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
79. “A flower touches everyone’s heart.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
80. “You are one of my nicest thoughts.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
81. “I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I’d rather be doing something I wanted to do. I’d walk it again.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
82. “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
83. “The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
84. “I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
85. “I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
86. “Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
87. “I think it’s so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary – you’re happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
88. “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
89. “Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the color?”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
90. “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
91. “I can’t live where I want to, I can’t go where I want to go, I can’t do what I want to, I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
92. “I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
93. “We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
94. “Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
95. “I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see – and I don’t.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
96. “I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven’t seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
97. “I’m glad I want everything in the world – good and bad – bitter and sweet – I want it all.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
98. “I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I’ll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they’ll have to look at them – and they did.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
99. “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
100. “Making your unknown known is the important thing – and keeping the unknown always beyond you – catching – crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life – only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead – that you must always keep working to grasp…”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
