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paul klee Quotes



Quotes by paul klee - (57 quotes)

Paul Klee - From the Abstraction category:

The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Activity category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Beauty category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Beauty category:

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Beginning category:

It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Beginning category:

I must begin, not with hypothesis, but with specific instances, no matter how minute. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Change category:

Becoming is superior to being. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Character category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Children category:

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Colour category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Colour category:

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Colour category:

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Complaining category:

One does not lash what 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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Composition category:

Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political – satirical – conceits expressed in one figure or a few. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Creativity category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Creativity category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Desire category:

Every artist would like to live in the central organ of creation... Not all are destined to get there... but our beating hearts drive us deep down, right into the pit of creation. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Drawing category:

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Dreams category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Energy category:

Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Fear category:

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... (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Fire category:

A certain fire pretends to be alive; it awakens. Working its way along the hand as a conductor, it reaches the support and engulfs it; then a leaping spark closes the circle it was to trace, coming back to the eye and beyond. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Form category:

The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Genius category:

Genius is the error in the system. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Goals category:

Be winged arrows aiming at fulfillment and goal. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Harmony category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Health category:

What my art probably lacks is a kind of passionate humanity... There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between myself and the many. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Humanity category:

Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Humanity category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Instinct category:

Standing at his appointed place, at the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Life category:

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Light category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Lines category:

A line is a dot that went for a walk. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Lines category:

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Mirrors category:

Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface... but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Mysteries category:

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Nature category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Nature category:

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion; let the artist be truly taciturn. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Painting category:

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Painting category:

I paint in order not to cry. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Politics category:

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist's power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Production category:

It is precisely the way which is productive - this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being... (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Reality category:

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Renewal category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Sacrifice category:

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Seeing category:

The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Seeing category:

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Seeing category:

One eye sees, the other feels. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Simplicity category:

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Simplicity category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Space category:

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. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Spirituality category:

My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright... They are all very kind to me. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Studio category:

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)

Paul Klee - From the Style category:

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Time category:

A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Universe category:

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art. (Paul Klee)

Paul Klee - From the Vision category:

Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible. (Paul Klee)