Paul Klee Quotes

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.

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.

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.

Becoming is superior to being.

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.

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.

Make chance essential.

There is no substitute for intuition.

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.

There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result … in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things.

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

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

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

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.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

We construct and keep on constructing, yet intuition is still a good thing.

It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest.

I still come closest to success with drawing.

I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.

One eye sees, the other feels.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

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?

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

A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.

I paint in order not to cry.

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.

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.

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!

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artists power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

My self . . . is a dramatic ensemble. Here a prophetic ancestor makes his appearance. Here a brutal hero shouts. Here an alcoholic bon vivant argues with a learned professor. Here a lyric muse, chronically love-struck, raises her eyes to heaven. Her papa steps forward, uttering pedantic protests. Here the indulgent uncle intercedes. Here the aunt babbles gossip. Here the maid giggles lasciviously. And I look upon it all with amazement, the sharpened pen in my left hand.

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

One day I will lie nowhere with an angel at my side.

Color and I are one. I am a painter.

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

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.

Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.

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.

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

Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.

Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord.

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.