Quotes from Milan Kundera

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

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

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

Speak truth to power.

The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

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

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

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

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.

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

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.

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

There is no perfection only life

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

I find myself fascinating.

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.

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

Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.