If you are no stranger to the art world, then perhaps you are familiar with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her artwork. The artist has left a considerable impact not only on the art universe but also on Mexican ancestry and myriad people worldwide. Frida Kahlo art, which can be almost given its own distinctive art genre, is best known for its unflinching and beautifully colored self-portraits, which explore the issues of identity, the human body, and mortality.
In many Frida Kahlo paintings, the spectator can sense the struggles the artist endured due to the chronic pain caused by a bus accident when she was 18. Besides the depiction of pain and suffering, the artist was praised for her uncompromising portrayal of the feminine experience and her evident love for Mexico's colors and culture. However, the world remembers Kahlo not only for her mesmerizing artwork. The inspiring quotes Kahlo left behind still echo with millions of people who can relate to the struggles and experiences the artist went through.
Frida Kahlo quotes speak for themselves. She masterfully pieces simple words together and paints sentences that hit close to home for many. In her famous quotes, the artist conveys the importance of art, love, and being honest with yourself; she explores the essence of life, pain, suffering, and much more. And all these almost-poetry-sounding inspirational quotes, the artist has so beautifully portrayed in her works of art.
Below, we have compiled a list of quotes by Frida Kahlo that will undoubtedly strike a chord with you. There's something to discover for everyone. Is there a Frida Kahlo quote you particularly liked that has really sunk in? Let us know!
This post may include affiliate links.
"I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return."
This was said by Frida prior to being released from the hospital. It is misused so often and misinterpreted that she was wishing to die when she said it. Not true at the time she spoke this famous quote.
"Don't build a wall around your suffering. It may devour you from the inside."
"No place in life is sadder than an empty bed."
"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."
"Mankind owns its destiny, and its destiny is the earth. We are destroying it until we have no destiny."
"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."
"You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn't afraid to fall."
"The fact that I painted myself twice, I think, is nothing but the representation of my loneliness."
"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."
"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."
"Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts."
"You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin."
"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."
"Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure."
"Name of Diego. Name of love. Don’t let the tree get thirsty it loves you so much. It treasured your seed, it crystallized your life at six in the morning."
"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."
"Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."
"Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light."
"I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you."
"Pain, pleasure, and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence."
"Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light."
"I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling."
"One day they asked me who I wanted to marry, and I said I would not marry, but I did want to have a child by Diego Rivera."
"I would like to give you everything I never had, but not even then would you know how beautiful is it to love you."
"Never in all my life will I forget your presence. You found me torn to pieces, and you sent me back whole, complete."
"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'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."
"It's not possible to present an accurate picture of our culture without all the voices of the people in the culture."
"I have struggled and suffered so much that I deserve something whole, intense, indestructible."
"I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: 'Poor thing, she's crazy!'"
"Remember that every tick-tock is a second of life that goes by and doesn't repeat itself."
"We like being sick to protect ourselves. Someone – something – always protects us from the truth – Our own ignorance and fear. Fear of everything – fear of knowing that we are no more than vectors direction construction and destruction to be alive."
"They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."
"There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst."
"My subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind, and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me."
"As always, when I walk away from you, I carry your world and your life with me, and that's what I can't recover from."
"You were called autochrome, the one who captures color. I chromophore — the one who gives color."
"This upper class is disgusting and I'm furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor."
"I am nauseated by all these rotten people in Europe – and these 'democracies' are not worth even a crumb."
"What I wanted to express, more intensely and clearly was that the reason people needed to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear."
"So forgotten and so firm. Snail shells and the bride-doll is yours too – I mean, it is you."
"Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego."
"I have to fight with all my strength to contribute the few positive things my health allows me to the revolution"
"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."
"The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him."
"I love you more than my own skin and even though you don’t love me the same way, you love me anyway, don’t you? And if you don’t, I’ll always have the hope that you do, and I’m satisfied with that."
"It is six o’clock in the morning and the turkeys are singing, the warmth of human tenderness. Companionable solitude. Never, in all my life will I forget your presence. You took me to you when I was shattered and you restored me to a complete whole. In this small world, where shall I turn my eyes? It’s deep immense!"
"They sit for hours in the cafes, warming their precious behinds and talking without stopping about culture, art, revolution, and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsenses and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true."
"Quietly, the grief, loudly the pain. The accumulated poison love faded away. Mine was a strange world of criminal silences of strangers' watchful eyes misreading the evil. Darkness in the daytime, I didn’t live the nights."
"Through the round numbers and the colored nerves, the stars are made and the worlds are sounds."
"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."
"I have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering and knowing how much I love Diego you must understand that these troubles will never end in my 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."
"People, in general, are scared to death of the war and all the exhibitions have been a failure."
"My father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a fascinating man, quite elegant when moving, when walking."
"I no longer have even the slightest hope. It all moves to the beat of which my belly holds."
"So at the emerging level, you can't have a good survey art show without women and artists of color."
"The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes. Aside from that, I like nothing. My head is too small."
"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."
"No moon, sun, diamond, hands – fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea. pine green, pink glass, eye, mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming."
"If only, I had his caresses upon me. As the air touches the earth – the reality of his person would make me merrier, it would take me away from the feeling which fills me with gray. Nothing inside me would be so deep, so final. But, how can I explain to him my need for tenderness! My loneliness over the years. My structure displeases me because of its lack of harmony, and its unfitness. I think it would be better for me to go, to go and not to run away. If it were all over within an instant."
"They amputated my leg 6 months ago It seemed to me centuries of torture and at times I nearly went crazy. I still feel like committing suicide Diego prevents me from doing it in the vain belief that maybe he will need me. He has told me so and I believe him. But I have never suffered so much in my life. I’ll wait a while."
"You left us, Chabela Villasenor. But your voice, your electricity, your enormous talent, your poetry, your light, your mystery, all that remains of you – is still alive."
"Years. Waiting with anguish hidden away, my spine is broken, and the immense glance, footless through the vast path… Carrying on my life enclosed in steel."
"What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death."
"It gave him (Diego) great pleasure when I arrived with the midday meal in a basket covered with flowers."
"I cannot speak of Diego as my husband because that term when applied to him, is an absurdity."
"It is certain that they are going to amputate my right leg. Details I don’t know much but the opinions are very reliable. Dr. Luis Mendes and Dr. Juan Farill. I’m very very, worried, but at the same time, I feel it would be a relief. In the hope that when I walk again I’ll give what remains of my courage to Diego. Everything for Diego."
"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."
"There isn’t enough time there, isn’t enough nothing. There is the only reality. What once was is long gone! What remains, are the transparent roots appearing transformed into an eternal fruit tree Your fruits already give scent your flowers give color blooming in the joy of wind and flower."
