Top 100 Kundera Quotes

#1. To laugh is to live profoundly ... The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter ... it is an expression of being rejoicing at being ...

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #668
#2. To laugh is to live profoundly.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #3306
#3. Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #5937
#4. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.
Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #7246
#5. Don't lie!' 'Tell the truth!' are words which we must never say to another person in so far as we consider him our equal.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #8735
#6. He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #11407
#7. In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #14529
#8. The larger the searchlight, the larger the searchlight of the unknown.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #16465
#9. Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #17492
#10. Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #19883
#11. Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #20034
#12. Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #23904
#13. If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #33627
#14. The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #43953
#15. 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

Kundera Quotes #47378
#16. Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #48039
#17. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #51392
#18. It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #51994
#19. The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #55046
#20. The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #56499
#21. Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #57492
#22. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #61715
#23. The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #65504
#24. If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #72553
#25. 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

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

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #77545
#27. 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

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

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #85030
#30. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #89254
#31. Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #91853
#32. 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

Kundera Quotes #92961
#33. Each interpreted the other's words in his own way, and the lived in perfect harmony, the perfect solidarity of perfect Mutual misunderstanding.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #93208
#34. Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #95676
#35. [ ... ] when it's a question of wahre Liebe, true love, the beloved hardly matters.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #97568
#36. Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #101101
#37. A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #107604
#38. Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #109632
#39. If God's masons built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to destroy them. But instead of walls all I see is backdrops, sets. And sets are made to be destroyed.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #115436
#40. In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #116912
#41. Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.
Saturday found him for the first time strolling alone through Zurich, breathing in the heady smell of his freedom. New adventures hid around each corner. The future was again a secret.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #117997
#42. Sad company is bad company.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #120252
#43. There is no perfection only life

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #120861
#44. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #121460
#45. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #123080
#46. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #123525
#47. Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #125989
#48. But who then was he? What could his own self really consist of? He bent over that self in order to peer into it, but all he could find was the reflection of himself bending over himself to peer into that self ... Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #127635
#49. Nudity is the uniform of the other side ... nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #131246
#50. She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #133087
#51. Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #134918
#52. I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud).

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #135308
#53. Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #137403
#54. She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #139273
#55. It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #145810
#56. It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #146254
#57. When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #149045
#58. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #153729
#59. The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.'
Where to?' The girl feigned surprise.
Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man.
Is that any way to talk to me?'
It's the way I talk to whores.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #158785
#60. 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

Kundera Quotes #166882
#61. How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #167943
#62. The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #170227
#63. But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #172105
#64. I have no mission. No one has.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #177207
#65. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #182210
#66. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #190932
#67. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #191935
#68. The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #195707
#69. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #196661
#70. The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #203937
#71. There is nothing harder to explain than humor.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #209335
#72. He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #209566
#73. She had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #213844
#74. I have a strong will to love you for eternity.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #215104
#75. 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

Kundera Quotes #217737
#76. People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #217897
#77. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #221427
#78. Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #221993
#79. The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #223203
#80. We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #226382
#81. And even if she did find them ugly, she would never say so, because flattery had long since become second nature to her

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #227705
#82. People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles cease to exist.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #228406
#83. Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #229322
#84. Tereza burst out laughing
Thomas laughed with her

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #237129
#85. Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #240290
#86. The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #245718
#87. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #246299
#88. I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #255085
#89. Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it has had.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #260058
#90. By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #261083
#91. High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor ...

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #262262
#92. The ostriches were like messengers who had learned their vital message by heart, but whose vocal chords had been slit by the enemy, so that when they finally reached their goal, all they could do was move their mouths.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #262585
#93. Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #271659
#94. The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #277571
#95. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends ... and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #279882
#96. To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #287673
#97. I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #290045
#98. 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

Kundera Quotes #291651
#99. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #295457
#100. An optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

Milan Kundera

Kundera Quotes #303026

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