Top 40 Keith Haring Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Art is for everybody.”

— Keith Haring

2. “Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don’t do it for anyone else.”

— Keith Haring

3. “Children know something that most people have forgotten.”

— Keith Haring

4. “Nothing is an end because it always can be a basis for something new and different.”

— Keith Haring

5. “I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.”

— Keith Haring

6. “Art has no meaning because it has many meanings, infinite meanings. Art is different for every individual, and is definable only by the given individual.”

— Keith Haring

7. “The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint...”

— Keith Haring

8. “My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.”

— Keith Haring

9. “Art is nothing if you don’t reach every segment of the people.”

— Keith Haring

10. “If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can’t afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I’m all for it.”

— Keith Haring

11. “I am a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end.”

— Keith Haring

12. “As in all things: Time will clarify the events that are presently unclear.”

— Keith Haring

13. “Everybody draws when they are little.”

— Keith Haring

14. “I’ve always wanted to work for Walt Disney. That’s what I thought I was going to do when I grew up.”

— Keith Haring

15. “Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I’m sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.”

— Keith Haring

16. “Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The.”

— Keith Haring

17. “Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed, and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.”

— Keith Haring

18. “The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.”

— Keith Haring

19. “I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain.”

— Keith Haring

20. “There is nothing that makes me happier than making a child smile.”

— Keith Haring

21. “The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of ’life.”

— Keith Haring

22. “Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.”

— Keith Haring

23. “Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.”

— Keith Haring

24. “Individuality is the enemy of this mass society. Individuality speaks for the individual and makes him a significant factor. Art is individuality.”

— Keith Haring

25. “Pure art exists only on the level of instant response to pure life.”

— Keith Haring

26. “I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.”

— Keith Haring

27. “I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.”

— Keith Haring

28. “When I die there is nobody to take my place.”

— Keith Haring

29. “When it is working, you completely go into another place, you’re tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That’s what it’s all about.”

— Keith Haring

30. “When I grow up I would like to be an artist in France.”

— Keith Haring

31. “I didnt start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didnt know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.”

— Keith Haring

32. “Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it...”

— Keith Haring

33. “I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.”

— Keith Haring

34. “See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.”

— Keith Haring

35. “I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.”

— Keith Haring

36. “Art is life. Life is art. The importance of both is over-exaggerated as well as misunderstood.”

— Keith Haring

37. “Risks are what make the difference between new ideas and re-worked old ideas.”

— Keith Haring

38. “The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a “self-proclaimed artist” to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses.”

— Keith Haring

39. “Art will never leave me and never should. So as I go into the next part of the trip I hope it will be more creative and more work involved and less talk and more doing, seeing, learning, being, loving, feeling, maybe less feeling, and just work my ass off, ’cause that, my friend, is where it’s at!”

— Keith Haring

40. “People, I realize, cannot live like a patch of grass. They could, I suppose, at one time, but we are so far removed from that time that it is hard to conceive. People can, however, live their lives with the realization that they are constantly changing, products of their changing environment and changing situations, and time. They can live, at least, in harmony with the knowledge and co-exist with it instead of working against it.”

— Keith Haring

41. “I am becoming very hard on the outside and even softer on the inside.”

— Keith Haring

42. “There are some images that I will only use once, and not use again because they don’t seem to really hit the nail right on the head, but there are some which are so strong they have to be reduced; sometimes just reusing them makes them stronger.”

— Keith Haring

Featured in: Strong Quotes

43. “I think I was born an artist. I think I have a responsibility to live up to that. I’ve spent my life up to this point trying to find out just what that responsibility.”

— Keith Haring