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.”

“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.”

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

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

“Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.”

“No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”

“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.”

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

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”