Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

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

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

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.

When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.

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

It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.

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.

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.

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.

A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.

Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.

We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

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.

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?

I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

I've been afraid every single day of my life, but I've gone ahead and done it anyway.

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.

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

I decided to accept as true my own thinking.

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.

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.

My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?

Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.

I want real things ... music that makes holes in the sky.

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.

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.

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

The days you work are the best days.

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.

A flower touches everyone's heart.

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.

His letters ... have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty.

It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.

I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.

To make your unknown known - that's the important thing.

The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.

There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces.