"Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of ju...

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
~ Milan Kundera ~












The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes fr...
Show More
More Milan Kundera quotes
"In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that t...
"This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected encl...
"He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivis...
"The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy fil...
"When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by ...
"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went...
"Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.
"What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform...
"But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to pu...
"Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.
"A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man...
"The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.
"No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced th...
"He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seek...