Paul Klee
One eye sees, the other feels.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Age
To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.Collection: Positive
A line is a dot that went for a walk.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Beauty
Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.Collection: Art
The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.Collection: Art
A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.
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.
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.
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.
The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.
Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.
He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.
When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
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 does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.Collection: Art
Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.Collection: Color
Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.Collection: Art
Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Eye
All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!Collection: Artist
I paint in order not to cry.Collection: Art
Becoming is superior to being.Collection: Becoming
A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.Collection: Lines
There is no substitute for intuition.Collection: Intuition
All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.Collection: Art
Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.Collection: Real
Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin.Collection: Skeletons
See with one eye, feel with the other.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Uncles
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.Collection: Spiritual
One day I will lie nowhere with an angel at my side.Collection: Lying
Color and I are one. I am a painter.Collection: Art
I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.Collection: Want
The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Rain
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.Collection: Art
The pictorial work was born of movement, is itself recorded movement, and is assimilated through movement (eye muscles).Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.Collection: Color