Quotes by

Milan Kundera

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen. – Milan Kundera

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends. – Milan Kundera

A worker may be the hammers 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

Optimism is the opium of the people. – Milan Kundera

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

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

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone. – Milan Kundera

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because theyre going deaf, it has to be played louder still. – Milan Kundera

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novels only morality. – Milan Kundera

Dogs are our link to paradise. They dont know evil or jealousy or discontent. – Milan Kundera

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even ones 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

Mankinds 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 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 be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth. – Milan Kundera

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. – Milan Kundera

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. – 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

Happiness is the longing for repetition. – Milan Kundera

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