Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• 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…
• Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than…
• 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 sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
• There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
• Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
• War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one…
• There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting…
• He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
• The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
• We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't…
• The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
• Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image…
• Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
• Laughing deeply is living deeply.
• The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not…
• Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that…
• Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like…
• People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.
• A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects…

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