Top 418 Quotes & Sayings by Milan Kundera
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
I find myself fascinating.
How goodness heightens beauty!
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.
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 matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
There are no small parts. Only small actors.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
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.
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.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
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.
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
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.
The best actors do not let the wheels show.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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.
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.
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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.
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.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
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.
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Man's world is the planet of inexperience.
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.
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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