A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Milan Kundera

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
Milan Kundera

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
Milan Kundera

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera

Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
Milan Kundera


He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera

How goodness heightens beauty!
Milan Kundera

I find myself fascinating.
Milan Kundera

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Milan Kundera

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
Milan Kundera

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
Milan Kundera

Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Milan Kundera

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

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
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