Paul Klee Quotes
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I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.
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He neither serves nor rules, he transmits. His position is humble and the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.
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Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.
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Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.
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Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.
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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.
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My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
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Nothing can be rushed. It must grow, it should grow of itself, and if the time ever comes for that work, then so much the better!
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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.
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Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.
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It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.
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I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.
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I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about Europe.
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I paint in order not to cry.
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In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.
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Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies.
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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.
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It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest.
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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.
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I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.