Milan Kundera

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.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

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

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

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.

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.

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.

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course Genesis was written by a man not a horse.

Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es Muss sein

I find myself fascinating.

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They dont 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.

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

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

Loves are like empires when the idea they are founded on crumbles they too fade away.

Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue — perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

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.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us that makes our lives beautiful.

Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.

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 sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

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.

Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

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, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

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

Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. Its not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life eager to irritate us provoke and insult us tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

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 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.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

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

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.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves that we have lost.

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

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.

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

Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

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.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

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

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

A man possessed with peace is always smiling.

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

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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 of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

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

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

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 single metaphor can give birth to love.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

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

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.

How goodness heightens beauty!

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

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.

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

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.