Quotes By Milan Kundera

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

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.

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

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.

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

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.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

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 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.

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

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

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.

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.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

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.