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Milan Kundera Quotes

Powerful Milan Kundera for Daily Growth

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

Stupidity, Question, Having, Answer

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

Go, Other, Human Being, Extend

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

Devil, More, Clearly, Partisan

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

- Milan Kundera

Work, Reason, Literary Work, Fragment

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

- Milan Kundera

Historic, Which, Given, Novelist

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

Question, Comprehend, Built, Novelist

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

- Milan Kundera

Pet, Dogs, Link, Discontent

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

Pain, Feels, Hundred, Intensified

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

Soul, My Life, Almost, Pathological

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

- Milan Kundera

Man, World, Planet, Inexperience

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

- Milan Kundera

Time, Over, Took, Intimidate

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

- Milan Kundera

Traps, Too, Binding, Tightly

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.

- Milan Kundera

Humility, Push, Go, Ridicule

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

- Milan Kundera

How, Condition, How Much, Scorn

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

- Milan Kundera

Happiness, Sound, Like, Temple

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

- Milan Kundera

Listening, News, Broadcast, Ashtray

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

May, Still, Meant, Approximate

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.

- Milan Kundera

Change, Great, Laughed, Mockery

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

- Milan Kundera

Art, End, Disposition, Sensible

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

Moral, Buried, Fundamental, Mercy

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

- Milan Kundera

Change, New, Explanations, Descriptions

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

- Milan Kundera

Morality, Immoral, Does, Segment

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.

- Milan Kundera

However, Perpetually, Thus, Novels

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

- Milan Kundera

Great, True, Bisexual, Novels

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

- Milan Kundera

Memory, Forgetting, Against, Struggle

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

- Milan Kundera

Nothing, More, Repugnant, Feelings

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

Doing, Boring, Afternoon, Sit

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

New, I Remember, Discovered, Together

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

Seize, Metaphysical, Novel

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

Art, Illumination, Otherwise, Novel

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