Quotes By Milan Kundera

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

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

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.