All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Milan Kundera

Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
Milan Kundera

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

How goodness heightens beauty!
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
Milan Kundera

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