Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures but that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.

Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Art matters.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

Life without music would be a mistake.

Why do people compose music? Why do people listen to music? When we go into a concert, we go into a place where we want to experience a sort of ecstasy, to come out of ourselves.

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.