Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.
• You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
• For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
• Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
• No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
• True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
• How goodness heightens beauty!
• Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
• Optimism is the opium of the people.
• Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
• Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
• Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
• 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…
• A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
• To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
• 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.…
• Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
• 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…
• The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
• 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.

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