Quote

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

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
Real
Mercy
Relation
Animals
Escapes
Deep
Gaze
Mankind
Relations
Probably
Test
Animal
Radical
Moral
Tests

More quotes by 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
Image
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera
Image
To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
Milan Kundera
Image
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan Kundera
Image
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
Milan Kundera
Image
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Milan Kundera
Image
...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
Milan Kundera
Image
And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
Milan Kundera
Image
God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
Milan Kundera
Image
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera
Image
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Milan Kundera
Image
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
Image
she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
Milan Kundera
Image
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Milan Kundera
Image
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Milan Kundera
Image
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Milan Kundera
Image
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
Image
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Milan Kundera
Image
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
Milan Kundera