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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Milan Kundera

I find myself fascinating.
Milan Kundera

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

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

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

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.
Milan Kundera

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Milan Kundera

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

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

There are no small parts. Only small actors.
Milan Kundera

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Milan Kundera

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera

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

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.
Milan Kundera

Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain.
Milan Kundera

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

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Milan Kundera