148 Frida Kahlo Quotes on Her Life, Love, Art, Pain & Diego
Updated: May 10
Travelling through the streets of Coyoacán, an old residential section on the southwestern periphery of Mexico City inspires you to visit the Casa Azul of our beloved artist Frida. An unforgotten name from history who drew artworks through the pain of her life. When I write about her life and paintings, I feel that it was never enough words to describe her. Inspiration is a short word if you reflect on her life and artworks. As a result, I decided to take a look at her life through the lens of her own words today. Yes! I am here to make you introduce to the heart-melting Frida Kahlo Quotes.
Famous Frida Kahlo Quotes Everyone Should Read.
Frida Kahlo on Her Childhood.
"I was nursed by a nana whose breasts they washed every time I was going to suckle."
Frida Kahlo Quotes Describing Her Polio Incident.
"They washed my little leg in a small tub with walnut water and small hot towels."
"My childhood was marvellous, because, although my father was a sick man (he had vertigos every month and a half), he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter) and above all of understanding for all my problems."
"My ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera. And I’m going to tell him so someday."
"Diego is so gentle, so tender, so wise, so sweet. I’d bathe him and clean him."
Frida Kahlo Quotes about the Artist’s Beloved Alejandro.
"The only thing that as a friend I advise you is to have enough strength of will to support such pains as God Our Father sends us as a test given the fact that we came into the world to suffer."
Frida Kahlo’s Words from the Letters She Wrote to Alejandro after Her Accident.
"It was not violent but rather silent, slow, and it harmed everybody. And me most of all."
"Death dances around my bed at night."
"I am beginning to grow accustomed to suffering."
"Although I have said I love you to many, and I have had dates with and kissed others, underneath it all I never loved anyone but you."
"For nothing in this life can I stop talking to you."
"How much I would like to explain my suffering to you minute by minute."
"Pity is stronger than love."
Frida Kahlo Quotes after Her Breakup with Alejandro.
"I paint myself because I am so often alone."
"I look like many people and many things."
"No one in my house believes that I am really sick, since I cannot even say so because my mother, who is the only one who grieves a little, gets sick, and they say that it was because of me, that I am very imprudent so that I and no one but I am the one that suffers."
"To hope with anguish retained, the broken column, and the immense look, without walking, in the vast path . . . moving my life created of steel."
Frida Kahlo to Esperanza Ordóñez.
"Now as never before I feel that you do not love me anymore."
Frida Kahlo Quotes after She Met Diego Rivera.
"He is irritated by only two thing, loss of time from work—and stupidity. He has said many times that he would rather have many intelligent enemies than one stupid friend."
"Diego showed me the revolutionary sense of life and the true sense of colour."
"I suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down. . . . The other accident is Diego."
"In another period I dressed like a boy with shaved hair, pants, boots, and a leather jacket, But when I went to see Diego I put on a Tehuana costume."
"What is especially fantastic is Chinatown. The Chinese are immensely sympathetic and never in my life have I seen such beautiful children as the Chinese ones. Yes, they are really extraordinary. I would love to steal one so that you could see for yourself. . . . it did make sense to come here because it opened my eyes and I have seen an enormous number of new and beautiful things."
“I don’t particularly like the gringo people. “They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls (especially the old women)."
"His enormous stomach, drawn tight and smooth as a sphere, rests upon his strong legs, beautiful columns, that end in large feet pointing outward at an obtuse angle as if to embrace all the world and to support himself invincibly on the earth like an antediluvian being from which emerges, from the waist up, an example of future humanity, distant from us by two or three thousand years."
"Diego is beyond all limited and precise personal relations. He does not have friends, he has allies: he is very affectionate, but he never surrenders himself."
"I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth."
"I wish I were dead! I don't know why I have to go living like this."
"There is nothing to do but put up with it. I have a cat's luck."
"My paintings carries within it the message of pain... Painting completed my life. I lost three children... Painting substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing."
"My paintings are well painted, not with speed but with patience... I think that at least they will interest a few people."
"The hours without you is nothing. Everything without you seems horrible to me. I am in love with you more than ever and at each moment more and more."
"I wanted to make a series of pictures of every year of my life."
"I believe that by working I will forget the sorrows and I will be able to be a little happier..."
"I believe that soon this state of unspeakable troubles will pass and someday I will be able to be the same as I was before."
"I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return."
"I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving."
"Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light."
"At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can."
"My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles."
"Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."
"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."
"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 tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling."
"Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?"
"My subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me..."
"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world."
"Don't build a wall around your suffering. It may devour you from the inside."
"Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts."
"Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain."
"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."
"Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light."
"Love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain."
"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."
"Never in all my life will I forget your presence. You found me torn to pieces, and you sent me back whole, complete."
"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 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."
"I do not want a half-hearted love, torn and cut in half."
"I have no words to tell you how much I been suffering and knowing how much I love Diego you must understand that these troubles will never end in my life."
"You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand."
"Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego."
"I love you more than my own skin."
"Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic."
"Fall in love with yourself, with life, and then with whoever you want."
"It gave him (Diego) great pleasure when I arrived with the midday meal in a basket covered with flowers."
"You too know that all my eyes see, all touch with myself, from any distance, is you."
"I would like to give you everything I never had, but not even then would you know how beautiful is it to love you."
"I cannot speak of Diego as my husband because that term, when applied to him, is an absurdity."
"What would I do without the absurd and the fleeting?"
"Remember that every tick-tock is a second of life that goes by and doesn't repeat itself."
"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."
"Life insists on being my friend and my enemy."
"The fact that I painted myself twice, I think, is nothing but the representation of my loneliness..."
"All of you in a space full of sounds — in the shade and in the light."
"I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."
"You are all the combinations of numbers of life."
"Heart leaking something so string they can smell it from the street."
"So at the emerging level, you can't have a good survey art show without women and artists of color."
"Don't think I am going to sleep with you just because you took me under your wing."
"I am essence. I am an idiot. I am tenacious. I am. I simply am."
"I have struggled and suffered so much that I deserve something whole, intense, indestructible."
"I have not forgotten you — the nights are long and difficult."
"The only one who has taught me painting is Diego..."
"My Diego. I'm no longer alone. Wings? You keep me company."
"Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing."
"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."
"I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you."
"Everything is untouched. Later, came the days, new of you. Today, I wish my sun could touch you."
"My skirts with their lace flounces and the antique blouse I always wore xxxxxxxxx paint the absent portrait of only one person."
"I would not wish to harbor the slightest hope, everything moves to the beat of what's enclosed in the belly."
"Nothing compares to your hands nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days."
"All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours."
"I don't look at shapes. the paper love. wars. tangled hair. pitchers. claws. submerged spiders. lives in alcohol. children are the days and here it stopped."
"I don't know what my mocking dream thinks."
"I have stolen you and I leave weeping."
"The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion."
"All of you in a space full of sounds - in the shade and in the light."
"Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light."
"I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated all my blood through the tips of my fingers."
"The green miracle of the landscape of my body becomes in you the whole of nature."
"I penetrate the sex of the whole earth, her heat chars me and my entire body is rubbed by the freshness of the tender leaves."
"I have the taste of almonds from your lips in my mouth."
"At that instant still full of sensations, my hands are sunk in oranges, and my body feels surrounded by your arms."
"For my Diego the silent life giver of worlds, what is most important is the non-illusion."
"Nobody will ever know how much I love Diego. I don't want anything to hurt him."
"There is nothing absolute Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves - everything flies and goes away."
"Why do I call him my Diego? He never was or will be mine. He belongs to himself."
"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 'work'."
"Why did the others support me with their labor?"
"Nobody is separate from anybody else - Nobody fights for himself."
"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."
"I must have been six years old when I had the intense experience of an imaginary friendship with a little girl ... roughly my own age."
"Alone with my great happiness with the very vivid memory of the little girl."
"I have never seen tenderness as great as Diego has and gives when his hands and his beautiful eyes touch Mexican Indian sculpture."
"Life goes by, and sets paths, which are not traveled in vain."
"We all would like to be the sum total and not one of the numerical elements."