Quotes from Milan Kundera

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

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

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

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.

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

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 wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

All man's life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo Fear of falling No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

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

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.

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.

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

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