Quotes By Milan Kundera

Optimism is the opium of the people.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

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

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

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

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

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

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

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

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

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

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

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.

How goodness heightens beauty!

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

I find myself fascinating.

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

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

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

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.

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