Milan Kundera Quotes
"There are no small parts. Only small actors."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Actors)
"Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: People, Feelings, Nothing)
"Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Thought, Arguments, Effort, Nothing)
"Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Nudity)
"Optimism is the opium of the people."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: People, Optimism, Opium)
"The best actors do not let the wheels show."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Actors)
"How goodness heightens beauty!"
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Goodness)
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Power, Man, Memory, Struggle)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Fear, Delight, Exaggeration, Humility, Limits, Ridicule)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Imagination, Compassion, Nothing, Pain)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Angels, Devil)
"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Power, Freedom, Goodness, Purity)
"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Beauty, Life, Laws)
"Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Accidents, Criticism)
"People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Music, People)
"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Happiness, Temple, Laughter, Sound)
"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Hate)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Idea, May)
"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual."
- Milan Kundera
"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Ambition, Poor, Sense)
"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Art, End)
"Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Business, Innovation, Marketing)
"Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other."
- Milan Kundera
"No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition."
- Milan Kundera
"Happiness is the longing for repetition."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Happiness, Longing, Repetition)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Change, World)
"He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Anger, Time)
"I find myself fascinating."
- Milan Kundera
"Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries."
- Milan Kundera
"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Listening, News, Smoking)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Love, First, Memory, Metaphor, Metaphors, Woman, Word)
"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Morality, Knowledge, Existence)
"For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?"
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Existence)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Time, Being, Existence, Light, Man, May, Old, Will)