Without question, the world is in love with Frida Kahlo. And that includes me. However, Frida didn’t become vibrant and alive for me until the first time I saw a Frida Kahlo painting. I was at a museum in Austin, Texas (the Harry Ransom Center), and the way the docent described Frida’s painting and her life really resonated with my kids and me. The painting in question was untitled, but it’s generally titled “Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird.” It was so vivid and bright. The monkey and the cat were mesmerizing to us and the docent’s explanations of all of the symbolism were fascinating.
For most people (and this also includes me), Frida Kahlo is almost a commodity. Her likeness can be found nearly everywhere you look. You can find her on t-shirts, coffee cups, and she’s even been turned into a Barbie doll (that I really want, by the way). She’s simply exquisite. Breathtaking. Exotic. Beautiful in the most unusual and unexplainable way. However, people who are so fascinated with Frida can sometimes forget what it is about her that makes her so fascinating. First of all, it’s her art. Her surrealist renderings of a complex life that was filled with pain and grief captured the world’s imagination.
In addition to her art, Frida Kahlo is famous for being far ahead of her time. She had a profound insight into life that was brought about in large part because of her own suffering. She connects on multiple levels, whether you’re a person with a disability, recovering from a romantic betrayal, you’re a woman, or if you’re suffering from an illness. So many people can relate to Frida Kahlo and her famous quotes.
Even people who aren’t familiar with her art find joy in her many quotations. Let’s look at 130 of our favorite Frida Kahlo quotes.
Frida Kahlo Quotes About Pain, Love, and Loss
1. “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?” – Frida Kahlo
2. “I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.” – Frida Kahlo
3. “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
4. “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
5. “I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return.” – Frida Kahlo
6. “Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.” – Frida Kahlo
7. “Painting completed my life.” – Frida Kahlo
8. “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
Frida Kahlo Quotes About Life and Husband Diego Rivera
9. “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
10. “I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.” – Frida Kahlo
11. “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.” – Frida Kahlo
12. “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’.” – Frida Kahlo
13. “I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.” – Frida Kahlo
14. “I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.” – Frida Kahlo
15. “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
16. “Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.” – Frida Kahlo
17. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
18. “I paint flowers so they will not die.” – Frida Kahlo
19. “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” – Frida Kahlo
20. “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
Frida Kahlo Quotes About Her Art and Love
21. “No moon, sun, diamond, hands —
fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.
pine green, pink glass, eye,
mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.” – Frida Kahlo
22. “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t.” – Frida Kahlo
23. “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
24. “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
25. “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
26. “Diego was everything; my child, my lover, my universe.” – Frida Kahlo
27. “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
28. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
29. “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.” – Frida Kahlo
30. “Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.” – Frida Kahlo
31. “I paint my own reality. 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.” – Frida Kahlo
32. “I want to be inside your darkest everything.” – Frida Kahlo
33. “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
34. “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” – Frida Kahlo
35. “Love me a little. I adore you.” – Frida Kahlo
36. “Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.” – Frida Kahlo
37. “My painting carries with it the message of pain.” – Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo Quotes About Strength That Will Help You Stay Strong
38. “At the end of the day we can endure much more than we think we can.”― Frida Kahlo
39. “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
40. “You are all the combinations of numbers of life.” –Frida Kahlo
41. “Why do I need feet when I have wings to fly?”― Frida Kahlo
42. “To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.” – Frida Kahlo
43. “I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.” – Frida Kahlo
44. “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
45. “I love you more than my own skin.” – Frida Kahlo
46. “I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned how to swim.” –Frida Kahlo
47. “I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.” – Frida Kahlo
48. “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
49. “It is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger.”- Frida Kahlo
50. “Don’t build a wall around your suffering. It may devour you from the inside.” – Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo Quotes That Will Help You Broaden Your Thoughts
51. “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
52. “My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently.” – Frida Kahlo
53. “I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.” – Frida Kahlo
54. “All this anger has simply made me understand better that I love you more than my own skin, and that even though you don’t love me as much, you love me a little anyway — don’t you? If this is not true, I’ll always be hopeful that it could be, and that’s enough for me. – Frida Kahlo
55. “Feet, what do I need them for If I have wings to fly.” – Frida Kahlo
56. “I don’t want anything to hurt him, nothing to bother him and rob him of the energy he needs for living, for living as he likes, for painting, seeing, loving, eating, sleeping, being by himself, being with someone…but I’d never want him to be sad. If I had good health, I would give him all of it, if I had youth, he could take it all.” – Frida Kahlo
57. “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
58. 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
59. “I 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.”
60. “The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes.” – Frida Kahlo
61. “Passion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change.” – Frida Kahlo
Insightful Frida Kahlo Quotes
62. “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
63. “Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps filling all the paths of my nerves which are yours.” – Frida Kahlo
64. “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
65. “From you to my hands, I caress your entire body, and I am with you for a minute and I am with myself for a moment. And my blood is the miracle which runs in the vessels of the air from my heart to yours.” – Frida Kahlo
66. “Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.” – Frida Kahlo
67. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
68. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
69. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
70. “I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness.” – Frida Kahlo
Powerful Frida Kahlo Quotes
71. “There is nothing more precious than laughter.” – Frida Kahlo
72. “There isn’t enough time there, isn’t enough nothing. There is 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.” –
Frida Kahlo
73. “It’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.” – Frida Kahlo
74. “I am nothing but a “small damned” part of a revolutionary movement. Always revolutionary never dead, never useless.” – Frida Kahlo
75. “Everyone’s opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes.” – Frida Kahlo
76. “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
77. “To trap one’s self-suffering is to risk being devoured from the inside.” – Frida Kahlo
78. “Through the round numbers and the colored nerves the stars are made and the worlds are sounds.” – Frida Kahlo
79. “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
80. “My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles.” – Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo Quotes About Feminism
81. “What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?” – Frida Kahlo
82. “There is nothing left everything revolves.” – Frida Kahlo
83. “My blood is a miracle that, from my veins, crosses the air in my heart into yours.” – Frida Kahlo
84. “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
85. “I want a storm to come and flood us into a song that no one wrote.” – Frida Kahlo
86. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
87. “Mankind owns its destiny, and its destiny is the earth. We are destroying it until we have no destiny.” – Frida Kahlo
88. “So forgotten and so firm. Snail shells and the bride-doll, is yours too – I mean, it is you.” – Frida Kahlo
89. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
90. “Of the opposite sex, I have the moustache and, in general, the face.” – Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo Quotes About Her Paintings
91. “Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the earth suffer because of the rains, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape. To my way of thinking, everything has its natural compensation.” – Frida Kahlo
92. “I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.” – Frida Kahlo
93. “You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego.” – Frida Kahlo
94. “… there is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live.” – Frida Kahlo
95. “You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.” – Frida Kahlo
96. “I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.” – Frida Kahlo
97. “I had something in my throat. It felt like I had swallowed the whole world.” – Frida Kahlo
98. “Can verbs be made up? I’ll tell you one. I heaven you, so my wings will open wide to love you boundlessly. I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.” – Frida Kahlo
99. “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
100. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo Quotes on Suffering and Art
101. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
102. Loyalty is important to me. Can you be loyal?” – Frida Kahlo
103. “Her view of life, she told a friend, was: ‘Make love. Take a bath. Make love again.’” – Frida Kahlo
104. “I don’t need rescuing, Diego.”- Frida Kahlo
105. “Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were ‘sure’ of finding shirts.” – Frida Kahlo
106. “I just want your serious opinion.” – Frida Kahlo
107. “They sit for hours in the cafes, warming their precious behinds and talk 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.” – Frida Kahlo
108. “What do you think matters most for a good marriage?” – Frida Kahlo
109. “They say never trust a limping dog or the tears of a woman.” – Frida Kahlo
110. “Don’t build a wall around your own suffering, it may devour you from the inside.” – Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo Inspiring and Insightful Quotes
111. “I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.” – Frida Kahlo
112. “I paint flowers to prevent them from dying.” – Frida Kahlo
113. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
114. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
115. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
116. “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down… The other accident is Diego.” – Frida Kahlo
117. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
118. “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 because of its lack of harmony, 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.” – Frida Kahlo
119. “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!” – Frida Kahlo
120. “My Diego. I’m no longer alone. Wings? You keep me company. You lull me to sleep and make me come alive.” – Frida Kahlo
A Few More Powerful Frida Kahlo Quotes
121. “You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” – Frida Kahlo
122. “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” – Frida Kahlo
123. “I could kill that guy and eat it afterwards…” – Frida Kahlo
124. I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.” – Frida Kahlo
125. “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
126. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
127. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
128. “And to hold onto some dogged idea forever is a little rigid and maybe naive.” – Frida Kahlo
129. “No moon, sun, diamond, hands – fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea. pine green, pink glass, eye, mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.” – Frida Kahlo
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of diamond quotes about the power of long lasting beauty.
130. “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.” – Frida Kahlo
Here’s an excellent video that shows some of Frida Kahlo’s most famous paintings and it’s set to a beautiful piano ballad. Enjoy!
Beautiful.
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