Paul Klee quotes

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born painter and graphic artist associated with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. His work is characterized by inventive use of color, abstract forms, and playful imagination. He influenced generations of artists through his teaching at the Bauhaus and his remarkable artistic legacy. Here are 115 of his quotes:

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

Paul Klee

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

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

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

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

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

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

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.

Paul Klee

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

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

One eye sees, the other feels.

Paul Klee

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.

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

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.

Paul Klee

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Genesis as formal motion is the essential thing in a work. In the beginning the motif, insertion of energy, sperm. Works as shaping of form in the material sense: the primitive female component. Works as form - determining sperm: the primitive female component. My drawings belong to the male realm.

Paul Klee