"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

“Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.”

“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.”

“I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.”

“The Flawed Defence" Article by Milan Kundera in Salon November 2008. Retrieved 2010-09-25”