Milan Kundera Quotes

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

In my end is my beginning - that's what people are always saying. But what does it mean?

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.

I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?

Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

There is no solution, for there is no problem.

If invisible people eat invisible food does invisible wind blow invisible trees?

If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.

I am everything and I am nothing. I am just kidding; I am not everything and nothing. That would be ridiculous. I am just everything.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Philosophy can't build bridges, but can encourage people to cross them.

People often tell me I could be a great man. I'd rather be a good man.

The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.

The desire for order is the only order in the world.

If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real ..." and the "Ubi nihil vales ..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.

And Nietzche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're going to live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.