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Home
Authors
Milan Kundera
Czechoslovakian
Writer
About the author
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Actor
There are no small parts. Only small actors.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Actors
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#People
#Nothing
#Feelings
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Nothing
#Thought
#Effort
#Arguments
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Nudity
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#People
#Optimism
#Opium
The best actors do not let the wheels show.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Actors
How goodness heightens beauty!
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Goodness
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Man
#Power
#Memory
#Struggle
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,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Fear
#Humility
#Limits
#Delight
#Ridicule
#Exaggeration
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.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Nothing
#Imagination
#Pain
#Compassion
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.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Devil
#Angels
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Freedom
#Power
#Goodness
#Purity
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Life
#Beauty
#Laws
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Criticism
#Accidents
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#People
#Music
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Sound
#Happiness
#Laughter
#Temple
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Hate
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,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#May
#Idea
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Poor
#Sense
#Ambition
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Art
#End
Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Business
#Marketing
#Innovation
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Repetition
#Happiness
#Longing
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,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#World
#Change
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Time
#Anger
I find myself fascinating.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Listening
#News
#Smoking
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.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Love
#First
#Woman
#Word
#Memory
#Metaphors
#Metaphor
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Knowledge
#Morality
#Existence
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Existence
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,
Czechoslovakian
Writer
#Time
#Will
#Being
#May
#Man
#Old
#Light
#Existence