Milan Kundera

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

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

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

How goodness heightens beauty!

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

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

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.

Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable

If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

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