Milan Kundera Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Milan Kundera on Wise Famous Quotes.

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone

Everyone is wrong about the future.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.

Love begins with a metaphor, which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetice memory.
pg 209

(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.

I say novelist, not writer. The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work.

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

The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live.

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

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.

In languages that derive from Latin "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer

Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.

Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

There is nothing harder to explain than humor.

At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?

It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.

By writing books, a man turns into a universe.

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.

But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!"
"So can we," the corpses laughed.

Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent,

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
![Milan Kundera quotes: [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 quotes: [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)](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/milan-kundera-quotes-127770.jpg)
[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)

Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.

The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes.

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.

There was pleasure in Paradise but no excitement.
pg 246

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.

They talk on about death, about boredom, they drink wine, they laugh, they have a good time, they are happy.

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?

The life we have left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court.

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.

Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!