Milan Kundera Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Milan Kundera:

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.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Milan Kundera

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

Milan Kundera

How goodness heightens beauty!

Milan Kundera

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

Milan Kundera

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

I find myself fascinating.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Milan Kundera

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

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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.

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Milan Kundera

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

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

Milan Kundera

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Milan Kundera

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

Milan Kundera