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

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

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

Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera

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

The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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

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

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

There are no small parts. Only small actors.
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

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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

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

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Milan Kundera