Milan Kundera Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Milan Kundera Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Milan Kundera Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

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

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.

Milan Kundera

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Milan Kundera

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Milan Kundera

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

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

Milan Kundera

I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.

Milan Kundera

I remember that the day I finished ‘The Angels,’ part three of ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’, I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

Milan Kundera

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

Nudity is the uniform of the other side… nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Milan Kundera

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

Milan Kundera

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera