Top 80 Paul Klee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”

— Paul Klee

2. “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

— Paul Klee

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

— Paul Klee

4. “One eye sees, the other feels.”

— Paul Klee

5. “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

6. “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.”

— Paul Klee

7. “Becoming is superior to being.”

— Paul Klee

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

— Paul Klee

9. “One day I will lie nowhere with an angel at my side.”

— Paul Klee

10. “All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!”

— Paul Klee

11. “See with one eye, feel with the other.”

— Paul Klee

12. “I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.”

— Paul Klee

13. “The work of art is above all a process of creation.”

— Paul Klee

14. “Genius is the error in the system.”

— Paul Klee

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

— Paul Klee

16. “It is precisely the way which is productive – this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being...”

— Paul Klee

17. “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

18. “The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact – in the future.”

— Paul Klee

19. “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

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

— Paul Klee

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

— Paul Klee

22. “The beholder’s eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture.”

— Paul Klee

23. “He neither serves nor rules, he transmits. His position is humble and the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.”

— Paul Klee

24. “Be winged arrows aiming at fulfillment and goal.”

— Paul Klee

25. “You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.”

— Paul Klee

26. “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

27. “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

28. “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.”

— Paul Klee

29. “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.”

— Paul Klee

30. “I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about Europe.”

— Paul Klee

31. “The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.”

— Paul Klee

32. “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.”

— Paul Klee

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

— Paul Klee

34. “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

35. “Make chance essential.”

— Paul Klee

36. “My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.”

— Paul Klee

37. “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

38. “Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

— Paul Klee

39. “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

40. “We construct and keep on constructing, yet intuition is still a good thing.”

— Paul Klee

41. “I paint in order not to cry.”

— Paul Klee

42. “Nothing can be rushed. It must grow, it should grow of itself, and if the time ever comes for that work, then so much the better!”

— Paul Klee

43. “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

44. “The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.”

— Paul Klee

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artists power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.”

— Paul Klee

49. “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.”

— Paul Klee

50. “In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.”

— Paul Klee