Milan Kundera Quotes (136 Quotes)

How goodness heightens beauty!

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

I find myself fascinating.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Solitude a sweet absence of looks.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

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.

The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them......

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.

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.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth.

Optimism is the opium of the 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.

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.

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.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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.

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 one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says How nice to see children running on the grass The second tear says How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

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.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

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.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, antipathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.