Top 120 Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

11. “Filling a space in a beautiful way – that is what art means to me.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

12. “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

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 decided to accept as true my own thinking.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

38. “I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.”

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

42. “Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.”

— 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. “All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands...”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

49. “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

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