Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Klee - Page 2

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

To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only.

My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

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

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.

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.

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.

Be winged arrows aiming at fulfillment and goal.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about Europe.

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.

I still come closest to success with drawing.

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

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.

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.

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

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.

...A long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

I must begin, not with hypothesis, but with specific instances, no matter how minute.

The pictorial work was born of movement, is itself recorded movement, and is assimilated through movement (eye muscles).