Best quotes by Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Mexican painter

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, 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 known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until she suffered a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.

Kahlo's interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, through which she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929 and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling in Mexico and the United States together. During this time, she developed her artistic style, drawing her main inspiration from Mexican folk culture, and painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements from pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs. Her paintings raised the interest of Surrealist artist André Breton, who arranged for Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; the exhibition was a success and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. While the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre purchased a painting from Kahlo, The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado ("La Esmeralda") and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Kahlo's always-fragile health began to decline in the same decade. She had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, not only had she become a recognized figure in art history, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ movement. Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

Frida Kahlo quotes by category:

All CategoriesAbout beautyAbout loveAbout artAbout passion

PassionPassion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change.

ArtIt's not possible to present an accurate picture of our culture without all the voices of the people in the culture. So at the emerging level, you can't have a good survey art show without women and artists of color.

BeautyLoveI wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you. Since I fell in love with you everything is transformed and is full of beauty... love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain.

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.

I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better.

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they're not at all the same. But they're both symptoms inside the white male power structure.

I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality”.

There is nothing more precious than laughter

I paint flowers so they will not die.

I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.

Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint.

Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?

Mankind owns its destiny, and its destiny is the earth. We are destroying it until we have no destiny.

I want a storm to come and flood us into a song that no one wrote.

Everyone's opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes. And to hold onto some dogged idea forever is a little rigid and maybe naive.

I love you more than my own skin and even though you don’t love me the same way, you love me anyways, don’t you? And if you don’t, I’ll always have the hope that you do, and i’m satisfied with that. Love me a little. I adore you.

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

I think that little by little I'll be able to solve my problems and survive.

My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. 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. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

My blood is a miracle that, from my veins, crosses the air in my heart into yours.

What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?

There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.

I don’t like the gringos at all. They are very boring and all have faces like unbaked rolls.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.

To trap one's self-suffering is to risk being devoured from the inside.

I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.

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.

pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence

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.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

I had something in my throat. It felt like I had swallowed the whole world.

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

To feel the anguish of waiting for the next moment and of taking part in the complex current (of affairs) not knowing that we are headed toward ourselves, through millions of stone beings - of bird beings - of star beings - of microbe beings - of fountain beings toward ourselves.

Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

I paint flowers to prevent them from dying

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

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.

I love you more than my own skin.

No moon, sun, diamond, hands — fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea. pine green, pink glass, eye, mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.

I hope the exit is joyful and i hope never to return.

Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.

I paint my own reality.

Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

... there is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live.

Painting completed my life.

It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people - good for nothing - are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.

People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibitions have been a failure, because the rich bitches don't want to buy anything.

I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego.