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
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they’re all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Culture
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Books, Literature
Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Business
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Immortality
The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Change
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Life and Living
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Happiness
We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Identity, Names
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Goodness
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Books, Literature
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
Topics: Books
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
—Milan Kundera
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Arguments
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Laughter
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Animals
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Kindness, Compassion
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Solitude
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Memory
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Optimism is the opium of the people.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Optimism
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Anxiety
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Individuality
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
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s 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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: The Future, Future
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
Topics: Activism
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Shame
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Travel, Tourism
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Humanity
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