Quotes from Georgia O'Keeffe

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

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?

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.

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

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.

Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.

I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I'd rather be doing something I wanted to do. I'd walk it again.

The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable... and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

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.

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

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

I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.

The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.