A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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: Names, Identity
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
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Immortality
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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: Tourism, Travel
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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
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
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
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Relationships
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
—Milan Kundera
Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man’s image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Women
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Laughter
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Humanity
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Memory
The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
—Milan Kundera
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
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
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
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Faces, Face
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Happiness
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Anger
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.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Stress
Nudity is the uniform of the other side… nudity is a shroud.
—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
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Arguments
Optimism is the opium of the people.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Optimism
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Blaise Cendrars Swiss Poet, Writer
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Jules Verne French Novelist
- Henri de Montherlant French Essayist, Novelist, Dramatist
- Alfred de Musset French Poet, Playwright
- Andre Maurois French Novelist, Biographer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Jonathan Lethem American Novelist, Essayist
- Jean Giraudoux French Novelist, Playwright
- Emile Zola French Novelist
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