Creativity Quote by Paul Klee

Klee is quietly arguing against the cheap thrill of mockery from afar. You do not “lash” what lies at a distance because distant targets are too clean: they cost you nothing. Real ridicule, he suggests, has to sting the ridiculer first. The foibles worth depicting are “a little bit our own,” not as a moral confession but as an aesthetic requirement. Without that complicity, the work stays external - satire as tourism. With it, the critique gains the heat of lived knowledge, the sense that the artist is cutting into material that can bleed.

The line “Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh” turns artistic judgment into a bodily ethic. Klee, a painter steeped in early modernism’s obsession with inner necessity, is describing why art lands when it’s not merely about “them.” It’s about the artist’s entanglement with the world’s absurdities - and their own. The subtext is bracing: if you can’t locate the flaw in yourself, your commentary will be decorative, even self-righteous.

Then he pivots to “The garden must be weeded,” a domestic metaphor that makes the whole claim practical. Weeding is repetitive, unglamorous, and intimate; you’re on your knees in your own plot. For an artist working through Europe’s convulsive early 20th century - war, ideology, mass persuasion - Klee’s advice doubles as a warning. The most honest critique begins at home, because that’s where the contamination actually takes root.