Georgia O’Keeffe Quotes

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way.

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

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.

I said to myself, 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.

The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable – and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.

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.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

I said, ‘I can paint flowers.’

I have but one desire as a painter – that is to paint what I think to be the landscape of the inner self.

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower – the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower – lean forward to smell it – maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking – or give it to someone to please them.

I have things in my head that are not like anyone else’s – my moon in a rose. If I were an orchid in my mind, I wouldn’t let anyone see the sexual organs. Most people in the city stock tip them. Men admire women for their hardness.

Las flores son tan incómodamente mirado de cerca, considerarlo que las mujeres en acción.

No one can repeat the same flower – no one.

It’s odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don’t quite fully share the hell of someone close to you.

You are one of my nicest thoughts.

Above me, I saw a crowd of white flowers. I felt as if it were extremely graceful or extremely cold, but between the two that didn’t touch.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing – and keeping the unknown always beyond you…

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.

A woman is a self-taught artist, born with the non-reproducible possibilities of her own body?

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.

To be big enough to be noticed is not a personal condition. It is a fact of the physical universe – still largely unexplorable – that the human way of use must be measured.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves…

The indifference to my work helps rocket, extends me.

There is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

I have but one desire as a painter – that is to paint what I think to be the landscape of the inner self.

If painting cannot be understood without explanation, why should one explain, realizing that I take into consideration that there is no why.

From my point of view ‘right’ is not the important point. The important point is to have developed your vision completely.

I’d been taught to work like a man to live like a man. Of course, I worked like a man – not a woman – but I don’t suppose anybody thought of me as a woman.

I hope that I did sit in my chair only as long as the work was going well.

Did I present myself with the options of possible ascension?

The giving up of self, as the greatest success – not as the greatest selfed-out success of spiritual showboating.

I feel that very often a distinction must be drawn between a woman who is an artist and a woman artist, for while in the first case being a woman and being an artist is something very beautiful and miraculous in the other it is in opposition to something.

Nothing is less real, it is all equally real.

I want the person who buys my paintings to buy them because he/she likes my paintings and not because he/she likes me.

I am trying to make the unknown known. Too many people are trying to make the unknown known unknown.

I hate flowers. I only paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

I do not deny that I was often afraid but I decided not to be afraid of fear.

I don’t very often paint flowers.

It seems to me the most wonderful thing in the world.

I have found a language which has content, which is natural to me.

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

If you paint something, you have to put your whole soul into it.

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.

I wish to be aware, not reached.

Circle of white – baby’s bottom – light across the bottom of a glass – this and that – it cannot do service. These aren’t things, these are nothings of things.

Expressing oneself is breaking out into color or action. At that moment you are not afraid because you break out of yourself.