-
All is well with me. The rain doesn't reach me, my room is well heated, what more can one ask for? There's no shortage of work, either.
Paul Klee -
I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.
Paul Klee
-
The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact - in the future.
Paul Klee -
From the root, the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work. And yet, standing at his appointed place as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what rises from the depths. He neither serves nor commands he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him.
Paul Klee -
The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.
Paul Klee -
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.
Paul Klee -
Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of object, meaning, and style. This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.
Paul Klee -
Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.
Paul Klee
-
My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
Paul Klee -
In earlier days, even as a child, the beauty of landscapes was quite clear to me. A background for the soul's moods. Now dangerous moments occur when Nature tries to devour me; at such times I am annihilated, but at peace. This would be fine for old people but I... I am my life's debtor, for I have given promises.
Paul Klee -
Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.
Paul Klee -
I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.
Paul Klee -
Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.
Paul Klee -
It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.
Paul Klee
-
Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin.
Paul Klee -
It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.
Paul Klee -
We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole. But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X.
Paul Klee -
To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only.
Paul Klee -
It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest.
Paul Klee -
It is precisely the way which is productive - this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being.
Paul Klee
-
Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.
Paul Klee -
Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment.
Paul Klee -
Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
Paul Klee -
In my productive activity, every time a type grows beyond the stage of its genesis, and I have about reached the goal, the intensity gets lost very quickly, and I have to look for new ways.
Paul Klee