Top 100 Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#4. 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
#5. 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.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#9. I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#10. Happiness goes like the wind, but what is interesting stays.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#12. It is really so nice here-country-busy-busy with so many different kinds of things- ... I must say I feel far away in another world here- ... always we go to a new place ... the people have a kind of gentleness that isn't usual on the mainland.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#13. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#14. 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.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#18. 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
#20. God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#21. I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#25. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#26. My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ... very large white pillows ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#27. My center does not come from my mind - it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it ... It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#28. 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
#29. I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#30. His letters ... have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. My first memory is of light
the brightness of light
light all around.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#34. One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#35. I do not like the idea of happyness - 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 happyness.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#36. A flower is relatively small ... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#37. 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
#38. I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#39. I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#40. I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#41. 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
#42. 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. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#43. I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can't take the time to know.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#44. I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#50. I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me,so natural to my way of being and thinking.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#51. I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#53. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it. (Life, March 1, 1968)
Georgia O'Keeffe
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz)
Georgia O'Keeffe
#57. You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#58. Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#59. All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#60. I've been terrified my whole life but it never kept me from doing a single thing.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#61. It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#62. Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#63. 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
#65. The simple fact of yourself ... there it is ... just you ... no excitement about it ... a very simple fact ... the only thing you have ... keep it as clear as you can.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#66. Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect
wishes to arrange - intuition wishes to accept.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#67. 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
#68. I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#69. When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#71. 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
#72. I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#73. I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I've been afraid every single day of my life, but I've gone ahead and done it anyway.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#78. Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#79. 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
#80. Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#81. If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#85. I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#86. I am divided between my man and a life with him---and some thing of the outdoors---of your world---that is in my blood---and that I know I will never get rid of--- I have to get along with my divided self the best way I can---
Georgia O'Keeffe
#88. My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#93. 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
#94. I'm frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!
Georgia O'Keeffe
#95. I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#98. When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too ... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#100. Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.
Georgia O'Keeffe
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