He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 2
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. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 1
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 1
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
Happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
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 Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. Milan Kundera Czechoslovakian Writer More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them...... Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
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 Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
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. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
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 Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium. Milan Kundera Czech Novelist More Milan Kundera Quotes 0