Words matter. These are the best Milan Kundera Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
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.
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.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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.
Nudity is the uniform of the other side… nudity is a shroud.
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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.
I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.
Man’s world is the planet of inexperience.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.
How goodness heightens beauty!
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I’m successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.
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.
I find myself fascinating.
