Explore Quotes by Georgia O'Keeffe

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?

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.

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.

It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.

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.

A flower touches everyone's heart.

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.

To make your unknown known - that's the important thing.

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.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

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.

I've been afraid every single day of my life, but I've gone ahead and done it anyway.

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.

Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.

The days you work are the best days.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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