Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.