Milan Kundera

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

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

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

“He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”