Milan Kundera Quotes

What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends ... and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death.

Tereza burst out laughing
Thomas laughed with her

She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.

Misery and pride. 'On horseback, death and a peacock'.

Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)

To laugh is to live profoundly.

Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself.

Too much faith is the worst ally

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

There is no perfection only life

Adventure, the first great theme of the novel.

Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

He was not at all sure he was doing the right thing, but he was sure he was doing what he wanted to do

Where are all those virtues of unreason that have shaped our idea of love?

Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?

In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting

Birds of fortuity flutter down on her shoulders ...

The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.

How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Beauty by mistake'
the final phase in the history of beauty.

Is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us

The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all ... (p.24)

God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.

Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

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.

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.

Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.

The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.

The greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure.

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

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

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

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

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs.

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

[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)

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

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

There is nothing harder to explain than humor.

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

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

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

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

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

By writing books, a man turns into a universe.

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

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

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

Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!

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.

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.

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

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.

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

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

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

There was pleasure in Paradise but no excitement.
pg 246

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

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

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

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

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 .

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

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

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

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

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.

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

Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

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

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

Everyone is wrong about the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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