Top 120 Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes (2025 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

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, Resilience Quotes

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. “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

6. “To make your unknown known – that’s the important thing.”

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

10. “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

11. “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

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

13. “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

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

16. “You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

17. “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

18. “The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

19. “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

20. “I’m frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

21. “There’s something about black. You feel hidden away in it.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they’re really thinking about their own affairs.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

26. “The days you work are the best days.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

28. “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

29. “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

30. “I don’t know what Art is but I know some things it isn’t when I see them.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

31. “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

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

35. “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

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

38. “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

39. “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

40. “I’ve been afraid every single day of my life, but I’ve gone ahead and done it anyway.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

42. “I decided to accept as true my own thinking.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

44. “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

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

— Georgia O'Keeffe

46. “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

47. “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

48. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe

49. “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

50. “I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe