100 Quotes by Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe, an American modernist artist, is celebrated for her iconic paintings that often depicted enlarged and abstracted views of flowers, New Mexico landscapes, and other natural forms. Her art is characterized by its bold use of color, strong composition, and emphasis on capturing the essence of her subjects through abstraction. O'Keeffe's work challenged prevailing artistic norms and gender roles, as she navigated the male-dominated art world to become one of the most prominent American artists of the 20th century. Her ability to infuse her paintings with both sensuality and spirituality captivated audiences and provoked discussions on nature, feminism, and artistic interpretation. O'Keeffe's legacy endures as a testament to her innovative approach to art and her profound influence on shaping the trajectory of American modernism.
Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes
Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time. (Meaning)
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage. (Quote Meaning)
There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it. (Meaning)
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve. (Quote Meaning)
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. (Meaning)
Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me. (Quote Meaning)
If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment. (Meaning)
Fill a space in a beautiful way. (Quote Meaning)
You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare. (Meaning)
You are one of my nicest thoughts. (Quote Meaning)
One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt. (Meaning)
I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it. (Quote Meaning)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dearest - my body is simply crazy with wanting you - If you don't come tomorrow - I don't see how I can wait for you - I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours - the kisses - the hotness - the wetness - all melting together - the being held so tight that it hurts - the strangle and the struggle.
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.
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.
Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.
A flower is relatively small. Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.
"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."
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.
Fill a space in a beautiful way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 decided to accept as true my own thinking.
I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
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.
That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world - bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars - but it makes living great - doesn't it - I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all and a lot of it too
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.
My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.
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.
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 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.
I want real things ... music that makes holes in the sky.
You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
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.
A flower touches everyone's heart.
The days you work are the best days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.
It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
His letters ... have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty.
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 painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.
To make your unknown known - that's the important thing.
The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
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.
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.
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.
There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces.
I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
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.
Since I cannot sing, I paint.
I'm frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!
My first memory is of the brightness of light — light all around.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
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.
I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.
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.
Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
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.
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.
Happiness goes like the wind, but what is interesting stays.
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.
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.
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?
All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.
I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.
War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.
I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
You are one of my nicest thoughts.
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.
Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer.
I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.
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.
It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.
One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.
I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all.
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.
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.
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.
Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.
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?
Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.
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.
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.
I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.
If only people were trees… I might like them better.
I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.
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.
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.
We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz)
I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.
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.
I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.
I have not worked at all... Nothing seems worth putting down - I seem to have nothing to say - it appalls me but that is the way it is.
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
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 Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
