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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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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
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Klee
Paul Klee
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More quotes by 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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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.
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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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There is no substitute for intuition.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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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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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
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It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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Art does not reproduce the visible it makes visible.
Paul Klee
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Be winged arrows aiming at fulfillment and goal.
Paul Klee
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I paint in order not to cry.
Paul Klee
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All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!
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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Every artist would like to live in the central organ of creation... Not all are destined to get there... but our beating hearts drive us deep down, right into the pit of creation.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee
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He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.
Paul Klee
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The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.
Paul Klee
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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.
Paul Klee