Georgia O'Keeffe
Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.Collection: Beautiful
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.Collection: Life
Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Thinking
The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Self
If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.Collection: Nature
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.Collection: Criticism
Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.Collection: Things In Life
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.Collection: Real
Fill a space in a beautiful way.Collection: Beautiful
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.Collection: Nice
I decided to start anew-to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown-no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.Collection: Art
My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.Collection: Giving
I've been afraid every single day of my life, but I've gone ahead and done it anyway.Collection: Life
I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Feelings
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?Collection: Thinking
War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.Collection: War
I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can't take the time to know.Collection: People
We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz)Collection: Making Love
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.Collection: Artist
I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: New York
I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Sight
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.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Simple
The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.Collection: Fun
There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces.Collection: Lakes
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.Collection: Beautiful
School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to be at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself. I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way things that I had no words for.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Flower
You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.Collection: Flower
If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?Collection: Paint
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.Collection: Understanding
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.Collection: Ideas
Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.Collection: Thinking
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.Collection: Mean
All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.Collection: Earth
I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.Collection: Stupid
I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Quilts
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?Collection: Flower
There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.Collection: Black
I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.Collection: Art