Quotes By Milan Kundera
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Milan Kundera
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
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
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.
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
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.
Milan Kundera
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Milan Kundera
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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
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
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
Milan Kundera
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
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