Quotes By Milan Kundera

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

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

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.

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.

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.

How goodness heightens beauty!

Optimism is the opium of the people.

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

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.

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

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.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.