Milan Kundera's Quotes

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

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.

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.

How goodness heightens beauty!

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

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

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

Optimism is the opium of the people.

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

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

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

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

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.

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

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.