Paul Klee

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.

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

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.

It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest.

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

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.

Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

For the understanding of a picture a chair is needed. Why a chair? To prevent the legs, as they tire, from interfering with the mind

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.

Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.

I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.

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

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

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

My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me.

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

A line is a dot that went for a walk.