Milan Kundera's Quotes

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Milan Kundera

How goodness heightens beauty!

Milan Kundera

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

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

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

Milan Kundera

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

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

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.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

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

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

Milan Kundera