Quote

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

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Novel
Question
Answers
Wisdom
Comes
Everything
People
Stupidity
Answer

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
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Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
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For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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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.
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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
Milan Kundera
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
Milan Kundera
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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
Milan Kundera