“What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.”
Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
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Czeslaw Milosz 106
Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator 1911–2004Related quotes

“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”
1990s, The Perfect Crime (1993)

As quoted in Al Arab Vol. 9 (1970) by the League of Arab States, p. 9
“You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”
Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), pp. 27-28.

As quoted in 'Antoni Tapies', Serafin Garcia Ibanez, in the UNESCO Courier, June 1994.
1991 - 2000

“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”

"Pat Carroll; Gertrude Stein was never a bore" (January 8, 1981)

"Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" http://www.aol.bartleby.com/229/4011.html (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851)
Context: It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.