Milan Kundera quotes

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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

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

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

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.

How goodness heightens beauty!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.