Paul Klee Quotes
-
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.
-
I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.
-
Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.
-
I paint in order not to cry.
-
You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
-
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.
-
My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
-
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.
-
It is precisely the way which is productive - this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being.
-
Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
-
Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord.
-
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.
-
First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.
-
One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.