Quote

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

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
Questions
Truly
Ones
Serious
Child
Children
Formulate
Even
Naive
Indeed

More quotes by 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
Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
Image
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
Milan Kundera
Image
But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
Milan Kundera
Image
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
Image
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
Image
The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
Image
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
Milan Kundera
Image
I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
Milan Kundera
Image
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Milan Kundera
Image
...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
Image
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
Milan Kundera
Image
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan Kundera
Image
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
Milan Kundera
Image
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera