Quotes by Milan Kundera

“It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.”

“Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things...”

“During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simply had trouble calling up certain words or would say similar words instead and then immediately l...”

“Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.”

“Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, ...”

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

“Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.”

“If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.”

“[Large countries'] patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was ...”

“...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.(in that case my friend Hubl would have pointe out to me, no one loves us more than the police. That's true. ...”

“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”

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

“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.”

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.”

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

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

“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.”

“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.”