Quote

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.

Paul Klee

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Paul Klee
Age: 61 †
Born: 1879
Born: February 18
Died: 1940
Died: May 29
Designer
Graphic Artist
Lithographer
Painter
University Teacher
Visual Artist
Münchenbuchsee BE
p. klee
Klee
Paul Klee
Truly
Taciturn
Lasts
Prodigal
Point
Prodigals
Last
Frugal
Artist
Detail
Nature
Afford
Everything
Confusion
Must
Details
Garrulous

More quotes by Paul Klee

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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.
Paul Klee
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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
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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
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My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
Paul Klee
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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
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A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.
Paul Klee
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I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.
Paul Klee
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To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.
Paul Klee
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In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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Becoming is superior to being.
Paul Klee
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Make chance essential.
Paul Klee
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One day I will lie nowhere with an angel at my side.
Paul Klee
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By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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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
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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.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee