Frida Kahlo Quotes

Mexican painter1907–1954 10 quotes

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Drawing on the country's popular culture, she used a naïve folk art style to explore identity, postcolonialism, gender, class and race in Mexican society.

Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy, and she is known for painting her experience of chronic pain. She belonged to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, and has also been described as a surrealist or magical realist. Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, she spent most of her life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán. Her 1940 self-portrait The Dream (The Bed) holds the auction record for a work by a female artist, at $54.7 million.
Mexican painter

You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. 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.

— The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

Mexican painter

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

Mexican painter

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.

Mexican painter

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.

Mexican painter

The industrial part of Detroit is really the most interesting side, otherwise it’s like the rest of the United States, ugly and stupid.

Mexican painter

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

Mexican painter

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