Top 100 Milan Kundera Quotes

#1. The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #43953
#2. It's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death. It's hard to become intimate with them. It's hard to love them.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #47378
#3. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #75130
#4. All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #77545
#5. How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #79453
#6. a man possessed with peace is always smiling

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #84972
#7. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #85030
#8. We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places!

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #92961
#9. I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able to escape my bigamous state."
Milan Kundera, "The Paris Review" summer 1984 no. 92

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #166882
#10. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #196661
#11. He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #209566
#12. I have a strong will to love you for eternity.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #215104
#13. Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #217737
#14. I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #255085
#15. All novels ... are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #291651
#16. No one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #310986
#17. The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #316726
#18. Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #336828
#19. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #351098
#20. In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #388210
#21. Even a life of suffering has a mysterious value. Even a life on the threshold of death is a thing of splendor. Anyone who has not looked death in the face does not know this, but I know it ...

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #424047
#22. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #437362
#23. He could not quite understand what had happened. he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #438093
#24. Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #441386
#25. life is like weeds

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #442554
#26. He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #454171
#27. And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #460422
#28. Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #475046
#29. Beauty is a rebellion against time.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #477734
#30. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #512297
#31. Such forced compromises with the spirit of the times, though quite banal, are actually inevitable unless we are ready to ask everyone who doesn't like our century to join in a general strike.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #520223
#32. Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #560306
#33. Revolution in Love'. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #568508
#34. What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #571861
#35. A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #592138
#36. A man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #599203
#37. Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #609319
#38. Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #620747
#39. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? ... Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #626843
#40. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #628651
#41. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #636281
#42. When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #672906
#43. And I felt fear. Fear of that bleak horizon, fear of that destiny. I felt my soul shriveling, I felt it retreating, and I was frightened by the thought that it could not escape its encirclement.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #690581
#44. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #723246
#45. It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #740448
#46. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #751281
#47. Speak truth to power.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #789071
#48. That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #792461
#49. not even one's own pain weigh so heavy as the pain one feels with someone , for someone

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #808715
#50. Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #815451
#51. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #818354
#52. How goodness heightens beauty!

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #822242
#53. There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #854292
#54. When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #897864
#55. A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue "something higher"- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #926301
#56. To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #962049
#57. That idea would be embarrassing because there is something excessive about it, it would take to much energy to defend (while the best possible progressive idea, so to speak, defends itself)...

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #973587
#58. If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1004330
#59. But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!"
"So can we," the corpses laughed.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1085222
#60. If rejection and priviledge are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgement of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1094468
#61. Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1111142
#62. She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1128572
#63. How was she to reconcile men's desire with the desire to be beautiful in their eyes? At first she had tried for a compromise (desperate journeys abroad, where nobody knew her and no indiscretion could betray her); then, later on, she had gone radical and sacrificed her erotic life to her beauty.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1144535
#64. A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1193483
#65. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reign in the cemetery.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1206271
#66. Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1213828
#67. On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1215998
#68. Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1224336
#69. Beauty is a spark which flares up when two ages meet across the distance of time, ... beauty is a clean sweep of chronology, a rebellion against time.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1254613
#70. Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1269478
#71. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1270972
#72. And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1327263
#73. Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1341098
#74. Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1360640
#75. Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1365097
#76. The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1371377
#77. We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1371485
#78. Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1419495
#79. All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests ...

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1466325
#80. Jaromil had always regarded the future as an awesome mystery. It comprised everything unknown, and for that reason it lured and terrified. It was the opposite of certainty, the opposite of home.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1478917
#81. To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1481723
#82. He realized that the path of love, which Bertlef had suggested, was closed to him; it was the path of saints, not of ordinary men.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1486302
#83. Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1496641
#84. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music
pg 52

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1513289
#85. Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1531775
#86. The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1539546
#87. Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1559623
#88. He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1569798
#89. Love is a constant interrogation.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1623408
#90. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1640278
#91. She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1641930
#92. There is nothing rare about the merging of the bodies of two strangers. Even the Union of souls may occasionally take place. What is a thousand times more rare is the union of the body with its own soul in shared passion.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1650369
#93. When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1673109
#94. 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.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1692159
#95. There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1741486
#96. Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1783855
#97. But the longer a man grows in his own darkness, the more his outer form diminishes
pg 95

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1819920
#98. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to demand-free and asking but his company.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1820963
#99. He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears. He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly filled her with sadness. She felt sad that he loved her so much, and she felt like crying.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1860386
#100. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes #1861047

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top