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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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BrĂ¼nn
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More quotes by 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
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
Milan Kundera
No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
Milan Kundera
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
Milan Kundera
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
Milan Kundera
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Milan Kundera
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
Milan Kundera
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
Milan Kundera
Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
Milan Kundera
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
Milan Kundera
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
Milan Kundera
Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
Milan Kundera