Top 100 Kundera's Quotes
#1. Schneider's characters, like Kundera's, are sentient and sophisticated figures at a time when the constraints of Communist rule persist but its energy has entirely vanished.
Richard Eder
#2. What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.
Philip Roth
#3. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
Milan Kundera
#4. Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams.
Milan Kundera
#5. [M]an has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and other's. (p.130)
Milan Kundera
#6. 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
#7. We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.
Milan Kundera
#8. Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that is merits being duplicated.
Milan Kundera
#9. It's a great consolation to think that when we've long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth.
Milan Kundera
#10. The eye the point where a person's identity is concentrated.
Milan Kundera
#11. 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
#12. Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.
Milan Kundera
#13. 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
#14. Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.
Milan Kundera
#15. That's how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even 'the plainest' of them, the least exhibitionist, because it's not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.
Milan Kundera
#16. And she thinks, almost joyfully, that it's fine this way because the truth is finally revealed: she feels no need to understand him or to have him understand her.
Milan Kundera
#17. She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
Milan Kundera
#18. In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood
Milan Kundera
#19. ...Perhaps New York's unintentional beauty is much richer and more varied than the excessively strict and composed beauty of human design. But it's not our European beauty. It's an alien world.
Milan Kundera
#20. Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.
Milan Kundera
#21. not even one's own pain weigh so heavy as the pain one feels with someone , for someone
Milan Kundera
#22. He goes on reading, and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under Josef's name?
Milan Kundera
#23. Therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.
Milan Kundera
#24. The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.
Milan Kundera
#25. To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness
Milan Kundera
#26. Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.
Milan Kundera
#27. Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper. (pp.28-29)
Milan Kundera
#28. Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.
Milan Kundera
#29. Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
Milan Kundera
#30. On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.
Milan Kundera
#31. He took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
Milan Kundera
#32. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
Milan Kundera
#33. Change the world! In Pontevin's view, what a monstrous goal! Not because the world is so admirable as it is but because any change leads inevitably to something worse.
Milan Kundera
#34. 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
#35. You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
Milan Kundera
#36. 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
#37. Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
#38. In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.
Rabih Alameddine
#39. That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.
Milan Kundera
#40. Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual's life.
Milan Kundera
#41. Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
Milan Kundera
#42. Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcome into the day by Karenin. 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
(..describing how Karenin, Tereza's pet dog welcomed each day)
Milan Kundera
#43. 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
#44. Everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late ...
Milan Kundera
#45. [B]ut pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable.
Milan Kundera
#46. She fixed him with a long careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony's intelligent sparkle
Milan Kundera
#47. After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.
A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.
Milan Kundera
#48. 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.
Milan Kundera
#49. The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
#50. 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
#51. Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.
Milan Kundera
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. [ ... ] when it's a question of wahre Liebe, true love, the beloved hardly matters.
Milan Kundera
#55. 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
#56. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.
Milan Kundera
#57. 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
#58. The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
Milan Kundera
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Milan Kundera
#62. 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
#63. The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Milan Kundera
#64. If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
Milan Kundera
#65. Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
#66. Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan Kundera
#67. Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
#68. Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
Milan Kundera
#69. The larger the searchlight, the larger the searchlight of the unknown.
Milan Kundera
#70. In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously.
Milan Kundera
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.
Milan Kundera
#76. 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
#77. In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
#78. What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion.
Milan Kundera
#79. The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
Milan Kundera
#80. I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement.
Milan Kundera
#81. Oh, all that was so far away, almost forgotten. But during her mother's five-day stay in Paris, that feeling of inferiority, of weakness, of dependency came over her again.
Milan Kundera
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. What's the matter?" he asked
"nothing"
"what do you want me to do for you?"
"i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older"
what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
Milan Kundera
#85. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
Milan Kundera
#86. Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
Milan Kundera
#87. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Milan Kundera
#88. But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
Milan Kundera
#89. The crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death.
Milan Kundera
#90. The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity ... The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity ... a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
Milan Kundera
#91. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Milan Kundera
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends
Milan Kundera
#99. 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
#100. 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
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