Quotes by Milan Kundera

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.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

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.

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

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

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.

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

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.