Paul Klee Quotes
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Frightened, I jump up from the bank, the struggle begins anew. Bitterness has returned. I am not Pan in the reed, I am merely a human being and want to climb a few steps, but really climb them.
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The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.
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The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.
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The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.
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A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.
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To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke.
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One eye sees, the other feels.
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Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.
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An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake.
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I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing. Then I want to do something modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil will be able to hold without technique.
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Light and the rational forms are locked in combat; light sets them into motion, bends what is straight, makes parallels oval, inscribes circles in the intervals, makes the intervals active.
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Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain.
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The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture.
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The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.
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For the understanding of a picture a chair is needed. Why a chair? To prevent the legs, as they tire, from interfering with the mind.
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It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.
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To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.
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The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.
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I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.
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Chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. There, where the powerhouse of all time and space call it brain or heart of creation activates every function, who is the artist who would not dwell there?