Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Klee

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Swiss artist Paul Klee.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Swiss - Artist | December 18, 1879 - June 29, 1940

Source: Wikipedia

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

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

Paul Klee

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

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

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

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there 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

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

One eye sees, the other feels.

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

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

Paul Klee

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

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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.

Paul Klee

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Paul Klee

Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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.

Paul Klee

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.

Paul Klee

Make chance essential.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

See with one eye, feel with the other.

Paul Klee

There is no substitute for intuition.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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

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

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.

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

It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.

Paul Klee

You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.

Paul Klee

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

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

I paint in order not to cry.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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!

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

Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.

Paul Klee

Genius is the error in the system.

Paul Klee

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

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.

Paul Klee

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

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

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Paul Klee

Becoming is superior to being.

Paul Klee

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

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

Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin.

Paul Klee

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

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?

Paul Klee

I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.

Paul Klee

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

Paul Klee

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.

Paul Klee

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