Quote

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

Milan Kundera

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Discover
Writer
Means
Truth
Doe
Mean
Writing
Preach

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
Image
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
Milan Kundera
Image
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
Milan Kundera
Image
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Milan Kundera
Image
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
Milan Kundera
Image
She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
Milan Kundera
Image
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
Milan Kundera
Image
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
Milan Kundera
Image
No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
Milan Kundera
Image
Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
Milan Kundera
Image
Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
Milan Kundera
Image
Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
Milan Kundera
Image
Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
Milan Kundera
Image
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
Image
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
Image
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera
Image
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera