Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
• To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -…
• Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
• All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
• Happiness is the longing for repetition.
• I find myself fascinating.
• People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
• 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…
• Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
• The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
• Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
• Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
• The best actors do not let the wheels show.
• Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
• 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'…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear…

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