Selected Quotes by Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo- Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico.
She was inspired by Mexico's popular culture. She employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of class, gender, identity, postcolonialism, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy.
In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.
Source: Wikipedia
Quotes by Frida Kahlo:
“I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”
Frida Kahlo, Happiness
“I don’t want you to think like I do. I just want you to think.”
Frida Kahlo, Goals
“They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore…I would rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“No place in life is sadder than an empty bed.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“They say never trust a limping dog or the tears of a woman.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Don’t build a wall around your own suffering, it may devour you from the inside.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I hope the exit is joyful and i hope never to return.”
Frida Kahlo, Hope, Happiness, Goals
“I paint flowers to prevent them from dying.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“… There is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live.”
Frida Kahlo, Death, Goals
“I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I don’t need rescuing, Diego.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I just want your serious opinion.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I want a storm to come and flood us into a song that no one wrote.”
Frida Kahlo, Happiness
“Mankind owns its destiny, and its destiny is the earth. We are destroying it until we have no destiny.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“So forgotten and so firm. Snail shells and the bride-doll, is yours too ~ I mean, it is you.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly.”
Frida Kahlo, Happiness
“This upper class is disgusting and I’m furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“There is nothing left everything revolves.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Through the round numbers and the colored nerves the stars are made and the worlds are sounds.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I am my own muse; I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Years. Waiting with anguish hidden away, my spine broken, and the immense glance, footless through the vast path… Carrying on my life enclosed in steel.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“My painting carries with it the message of pain.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“To trap one’s self-suffering is to risk being devoured from the inside.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“There is nothing more precious than laughter.”
Frida Kahlo, Happiness
“My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It’s not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can’t.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“A despair which no words can describe. I’m still eager to live. I’ve started to paint again. A little picture to give to Dr. Farill on which I’m working with all my love. I feel uneasy about my painting.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“Painting completed my life.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn’t say otherwise.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“I warn you that in this picture I am painting of Diego there will be colors which even I am not fully acquainted with. Besides, I love Diego so much I cannot be an objective speculator of him or his life.”
Frida Kahlo, Art, Love
“Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“You didn’t understand what I am. I am love. I am pleasure. I am essence. I am an idiot. I am tenacious. I am. I simply am.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Love me a little. I adore you.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Diego was everything; my child, my lover, my universe.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Her view of life, she told a friend, was: ‘Make love. Take a bath. Make love again.’”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Where you cannot love, do not delay.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.”
Frida Kahlo, Love, Art
“Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I was a child who went about in a world of colors… My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Everyone’s opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.”
Frida Kahlo, Goals
“The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“It is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody,’ and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.”
Frida Kahlo, Society, Goals
“I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
Frida Kahlo, Happiness, Art
“I am nothing but a “small damned” part of a revolutionary movement. Always revolutionary never dead, never useless.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Loyalty is important to me. Can you be loyal?”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“I’ll wait for you. You responded to a sense with your voice and I’m full of you, waiting for your words which will make me grow and will enrich me.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“At the end of the day we can endure much more than we think we can.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I had something in my throat. It felt like I had swallowed the whole world.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.”
Frida Kahlo, Life, Intelligence/Wisdom
“You deserve the best, the very best because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“You are all the combinations of numbers of life.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness.”
Frida Kahlo, Goals
“My blood is a miracle that, from my veins, crosses the air in my heart into yours.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.”
Frida Kahlo, Happiness, Strength
“I want to be inside your darkest everything.”
Frida Kahlo, Goals
“People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibitions have been a failure, because the rich don’t want to buy anything.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“I cannot speak of Diego as my husband because that term, when applied to him, is an absurdity. He never has been, nor will he ever be, anybody’s husband.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rotting, why all this people – good for nothing – are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were ‘sure’ of finding shirts.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“The most interesting thing about the so-called lies of Diego is that, sooner or later, the ones involved in the imaginary tale get angry, not because of the lies, but because of the truth contained in the lies, which always comes forth.”
Frida Kahlo, Truth
“I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only real reason for living.”
Frida Kahlo, Strength, Goals
“I paint flowers so they will not die.”
Frida Kahlo, Art
“It is not worthwhile to leave this world without having had a little fun in life.”
Frida Kahlo, Life, Happiness
“I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.”
Frida Kahlo, Problems
“Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.”
Frida Kahlo, Life
“I love you more than my own skin.”
Frida Kahlo, Love
“Passion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change.”