Keith Haring famous quotes

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Thinking #Imagination

Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don't do it for anyone else.
-- Keith Haring

#Believe #Secret

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.
-- Keith Haring

#Reality #Paint #Transcending

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
-- Keith Haring

#Men #Drawing #Magic

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint... I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something... Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it... Nothing is important... so everything is important.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Thinking #People

Art is for everybody.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Art Is

Children know something that most people have forgotten.
-- Keith Haring

#Children #People #Forgotten

Pure art exists only on the level of instant response to pure life
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Levels #Instant

The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Eye #Reality

The dripping... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, its a natural part in the evolution of the work.
-- Keith Haring

#Trying #Doe #Evolution

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Responsibility #Reality

Everybody draws when they are little.
-- Keith Haring

#Littles #Draws

My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.
-- Keith Haring

#Drawing #Long #People

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.
-- Keith Haring

#Bad Ass #Self #Ego

Nothing is important... so everything is important.
-- Keith Haring

#Important

When I grow up I would like to be an artist in France.
-- Keith Haring

#Growing Up #Artist #France

I didnt start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didnt know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.
-- Keith Haring

#New York #Inspiration #Years

There are some images that I will only use once, and not use again because they don't seem to really hit the nail right on the head, but there are some which are so strong they have to be reduced; sometimes just reusing them makes them stronger.
-- Keith Haring

#Strong #Nails #Use

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Kids #Painting

I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.
-- Keith Haring

#Real #School #College

The public has a right to art … Art is for everybody,
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Art Is

Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it...
-- Keith Haring

#Thinking #People #Made

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
-- Keith Haring

#Enlightened #Fallen

You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people...that doesn't make you better than somebody who has no money but is sympathetic and genuinely loving to fellow human beings.
-- Keith Haring

#People #Use #Helping

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.
-- Keith Haring

#Opposites #Evil #Facts

When I die there is nobody to take my place.
-- Keith Haring

I think as much as possible, an artist, if he has any kind of social or political concern, has to…expose as much as possible what he sees so that some people think about things that they don’t normally think about… [Art] should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Thinking #People

Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed, and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.
-- Keith Haring

#Children #Color #Hatred

Art is nothing if you don't reach every segment of the people.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #People #Art Is

I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.
-- Keith Haring

#People #Shapes #Lines

Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.
-- Keith Haring

#Negative #Shapes #Function

Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well.... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.
-- Keith Haring

#Eye #Light #Blood

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint...
-- Keith Haring

#Reason #Paint

There is nothing that makes me happier than making a child smile.
-- Keith Haring

#Children

I've always wanted to work for Walt Disney. That's what I thought I was going to do when I grew up.
-- Keith Haring

#Grew Up #Grew #Wanted

The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.
-- Keith Haring

#Art #Lying #Creativity

I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something...
-- Keith Haring

#Heard