Quotes from Georgia O'Keeffe

Someone else's vision will never be as good as you own vision of yourself. Live and die with it, because in the end, that's all you have. Lose it and lose yourself and everything else.

As one chooses between the country and the human being, the country becomes much more wonderful.

Each time I leave here [Ghost Ranch] it is like a Death, and each time that I return it is a Birth.

This [Ghost Ranch] is my kind of world. The kind of things one sees in cities . . . well, you know, it's better to look out the window at the sage.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do—isn't it enough just to express yourself.

To see takes time.

I've always been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I've never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

I never did learn to spell. My friend Doris Bry says now that I've ruined her spelling because I misspell with such confidence.

the Piedra Lumbre is the best thing I've ever known in New Mexico---the closest thing to God, I guess.

Taos is] a high, wise, sage-covered plain. In the evening, with the sun at your back, it looks like an ocean, like water. The color up there is different . . . the blue-green of the sage and mountains, the wildflowers in bloom. It's a different kind of color from any I'd ever seen---there's nothing like that in north Texas or even in Colorado. And it's not just the color that attracted me either The world is so wide up there, so big.

I realize I must be different than when I came out [to Ghost Ranch], but it seems so long ago that I can't remember what I was like---so I can't lapse back to it---I can only be as I am---and I feel terribly alive---

I do not like the idea of happiness -- it is too momentary.

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.

I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way — things I had no words for.

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

It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.

It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

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.

The days you work are the best days.

I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.

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.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

Fill a space in a beautiful way.