Quotes by Milan Kundera

“The engineers ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poets mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively--and which had seemed so intoxicatingl...”

“Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.”

“All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be ...”

“The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.”

“No peace is possible between the novelist and the aglaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the aglastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily...”

“No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship wit...”

“Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I shou...”

“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of the...”

“It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.”

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper ...”

“Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible ...”

“I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, wa...”

“Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such...”

“Their message will never be decoded because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today h...”

“I thought of the fate of Descartes famous formulation: man as master and proprietor of nature. Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this master and proprietor is suddenly realizin...”

“therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of u...”

“The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new...”

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

“Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, me...”