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Creativity Quote by Paul Klee

"One eye sees, the other feels"

About this Quote

Klee compresses an entire aesthetic program into six words, and he does it with the mischievous calm of someone who knows representation is a trap. "One eye sees, the other feels" isn’t a cute ode to sensitivity; it’s a declaration that perception is already split. The so-called objective eye takes inventory: line, color, proportion, the measurable facts of a scene. The other eye refuses the audit. It registers charge, memory, dread, tenderness - the stuff that never shows up in a still life but always shows up in the viewer.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that art should be faithful to what’s in front of you. Klee, working in the early 20th century when photography had already claimed the job of recording reality, pushes painting toward what the camera can’t do: translate internal weather. That split eye also mirrors modernity’s own fractures: the period’s fascination with psychology, the aftershocks of World War I, the sense that rational systems can be elegantly designed and still produce catastrophe. "Seeing" alone starts to look like complicity; feeling becomes a form of critique.

Formally, the line works because it treats emotion as a sensory organ, not a private confession. Feeling isn’t an add-on to vision; it’s parallel, simultaneous, equally authoritative. Klee’s Bauhaus context matters here: he taught structure and theory, yet insisted the most rigorous art still needs a tremor of the irrational. The sentence turns that tension into anatomy.

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One eye sees, the other feels
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About the Author

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (December 8, 1879 - June 29, 1940) was a Artist from Switzerland.

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