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 KleeRead
To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that focusing solely on beauty is an incomplete understanding, akin to only considering positive numbers in mathematics.
Paul Klee's quote highlights the importance of a holistic view of art and aesthetics. He uses the analogy of mathematics, where limiting oneself to only positive numbers would yield a partial understanding of the subject. This implies that true appreciation of art involves recognizing complexity and depth, including elements that may not be conventionally beautiful or positive.
In practice
In a discussion about art, I might use this quote to emphasize the importance of seeing beyond surface beauty.
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.
I want paint to work as flesh.
People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure.
I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.
Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.
The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
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