
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
#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
#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
#4. All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Milan Kundera
#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
#7. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#10. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera
#11. He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera
#12. I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#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
#18. Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.
Milan Kundera
#19. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.
Milan Kundera
#20. In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#23. He could not quite understand what had happened. he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#30. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#34. What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion.
Milan Kundera
#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
#36. A man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur.
Milan Kundera
#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
#38. Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#42. When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Milan Kundera
#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
#44. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#49. not even one's own pain weigh so heavy as the pain one feels with someone , for someone
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#59. But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!"
"So can we," the corpses laughed.
Milan Kundera
#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
#61. Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.
Milan Kundera
#62. She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#65. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reign in the cemetery.
Milan Kundera
#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
#67. On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.
Milan Kundera
#68. Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#71. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#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
#76. The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#83. Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!
Milan Kundera
#84. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music
pg 52
Milan Kundera
#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
#86. The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
#87. Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
Milan Kundera
#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
#90. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#93. When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway.
Milan Kundera
#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
#95. There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Milan Kundera
#96. Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.
Milan Kundera
#97. But the longer a man grows in his own darkness, the more his outer form diminishes
pg 95
Milan Kundera
#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
#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
#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
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