Paul Klee Quotes

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

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

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

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

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

One eye sees, the other feels.

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

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.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

I paint in order not to cry.

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.

Becoming is superior to being.

There is no substitute for intuition.

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

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.