Quotes By Milan Kundera

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

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.

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.

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.

I find myself fascinating.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

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.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

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.

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.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

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.

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

How goodness heightens beauty!

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

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.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.