Quotes by Milan Kundera

• I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
• There are no small parts. Only small actors.
• Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
• Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
• Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
• Optimism is the opium of the people.
• The best actors do not let the wheels show.
• How goodness heightens beauty!
• The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
• Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
• Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
• People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
• The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
• 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.
• All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
• Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
• Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
• Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
• Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
• No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
• Happiness is the longing for repetition.
• 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.
• He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
• I find myself fascinating.
• Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
• Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
• 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.
• A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
• For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human 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.