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Quotes by Milan Kundera

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
– Milan Kundera
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
– Milan Kundera
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
– Milan Kundera
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
– Milan Kundera
Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
– Milan Kundera
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
– Milan Kundera
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
– Milan Kundera
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
– Milan Kundera
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
– Milan Kundera
How goodness heightens beauty!
– Milan Kundera
I find myself fascinating.
– Milan Kundera
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
– Milan Kundera
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
– Milan Kundera
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
– Milan Kundera
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
– Milan Kundera
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
– Milan Kundera
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
– Milan Kundera
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
– Milan Kundera
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
– Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
– Milan Kundera
Optimism is the opium of the people.
– Milan Kundera
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
– Milan Kundera
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
– Milan Kundera
The best actors do not let the wheels show.
– Milan Kundera
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
– Milan Kundera
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
– Milan Kundera
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
– Milan Kundera
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
– Milan Kundera
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
– Milan Kundera
There are no small parts. Only small actors.
– Milan Kundera
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
– Milan Kundera
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
– Milan Kundera
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
– Milan Kundera
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
– Milan Kundera
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
– Milan Kundera
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
– Milan Kundera
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
– Milan Kundera
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
– Milan Kundera
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
– Milan Kundera
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
– Milan Kundera
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
– Milan Kundera
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
– Milan Kundera
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
– Milan Kundera