16 Quotes from the Fabulous Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo is one of my favorite people. She was an intense, brave and magnificent woman who left an incredible legacy, not only in the form of her paintings but also in her words, lessons and the example of her struggle.
She caught the attention of the world with her ideas about life, breaking with the 20th century conventions of not only Mexico, but the global community. Even today, she continues to be considered revolutionary and unconventional. As an artist, people wanted to pigeon-hole her as a surrealist, but she never let them; as she herself said, she never painted dreams, she painted her own reality.
Kahlo’s experiences, including the tremendous blows and misfortunes that life dealt her and her passionate love for Diego Rivera, defined her. Her boldness, vanity, passion, and immense capacity for love are all evident in the words she left us, which transcend boundaries of time and place.
- “Feet, what do I need you for, when I have wings to fly.”
- “By putting walls around your suffering you risk letting it devour you from the inside.”
- “Pain, pleasure and death are nothing more than the process of living. The revolutionary struggle of this process is an open doorway to intelligence.”
- “Doctor if you let me drink this tequila, I promise I won’t drink at my funeral.”
- “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
- “Life insists on being my friend and my enemy.”
- “There’s nothing more beautiful than a smile.”
- “That which doesn’t kill me, nourishes me.”
- “They thought I was a surrealist, but I’m not. I’ve never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
- “Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies away and disappears.”
- “Beauty and ugliness are mirages because others always end up seeing what’s inside us.”
- “I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”
- “There are some who are born with a star and others who are born broken, and although you don’t want to believe it, I am one of the most broken ones.”
- “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 like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same way I do. I would imagine her and imagine that she too was out there, thinking about me. Well, I hope that if you’re out there and you read this you’ll know that, yes, I’m here and I’m just as strange as you.”
- “I wish I could give you everything you’ve ever wanted, but even then, you wouldn’t know the wonder of being able to love you.“
- “Is it possible to invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you. My enormous wings extend wide to love you without limits. I feel that we’ve been together since the beginning, that we’re made of the same material, we’re on the same wavelength, we carry the same feelings inside us. All of you, your genius and your humility, are incomparable and you make life richer. Within your extraordinary world all I can offer is this truth for you to receive — that I’ll always cherish the deepest parts of you. Thank you for accepting this, thank you for living, because yesterday you allowed me to touch your most intimate inner light and told me with your voice and your eyes the thing I’d been waiting to hear for all of my life.”
