Milan Kundera Quotes

I have a strong will to love you for eternity. — Milan Kundera

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought. — Milan Kundera

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

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

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

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind. — Milan Kundera

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

Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value. — Milan Kundera

Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself. — Milan Kundera

Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell. — Milan Kundera

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift. — Milan Kundera

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. — Milan Kundera

Love is poetry, poetry is love — Milan Kundera

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. — Milan Kundera

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

The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy. — Milan Kundera

Even painful memories are ties that bind. — Milan Kundera

What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion. — Milan Kundera

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man. — Milan Kundera

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses. — Milan Kundera

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself — Milan Kundera

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 — Milan Kundera

Her image of it came entirely from what she had heard. Or read. Or received unconsciously from distant ancestors. And yet it lived within her. — Milan Kundera

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

Elisabeth, can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him? — Milan Kundera

The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic. — Milan Kundera

Only cactuses had perennial appeal. And cactuses were of no interest to her. — Milan Kundera

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

No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reign in the cemetery. — Milan Kundera

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

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

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. — Milan Kundera

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

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

To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness — Milan Kundera

Is not parody the eternal lot of man? — Milan Kundera

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. — Milan Kundera

I have become so pessimistic that these days I'd even choose the truth over friendship. — Milan Kundera

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

The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins. — Milan Kundera

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. — Milan Kundera

Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth. — Milan Kundera

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

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern. — Milan Kundera

Physical love is unthinkable without violence. — Milan Kundera

A whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing — Milan Kundera

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

When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway. — Milan Kundera

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. — Milan Kundera

Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. — Milan Kundera

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

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

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. — Milan Kundera

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs. — Milan Kundera

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

[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

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. — Milan Kundera

It is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities" -- Pretty Wittgenstein like. — Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. — Milan Kundera

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

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

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am. — Milan Kundera

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

After all, when you give someone a present, you want to do so out of love, you want to give your friend a piece of heart! — Milan Kundera

There is nothing harder to explain than humor. — Milan Kundera

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

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

Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. — Milan Kundera

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks. — Milan Kundera

But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel? — Milan Kundera

His kindness tore at her heartstrings... — Milan Kundera

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

The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic. — Milan Kundera

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise. — Milan Kundera

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. — Milan Kundera

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

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

If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him. — Milan Kundera

He felt responsible for his fate, but his fate felt no responsibility for him. — Milan Kundera

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

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

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. — Milan Kundera

not even one's own pain weigh so heavy as the pain one feels with someone , for someone — Milan Kundera

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

By writing books, a man turns into a universe. — Milan Kundera

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

Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman. — Milan Kundera

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster — Milan Kundera

Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music
pg 52 — Milan Kundera

A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life - these were the gifts she had left him. — Milan Kundera

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. — Milan Kundera

They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it. — Milan Kundera

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

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

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

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries. — Milan Kundera

The crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death. — Milan Kundera

Franz could not accept that the fact that the glory of the Grand March was equal to the comic vanity of its marchers. — Milan Kundera

The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor. — Milan Kundera

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. — Milan Kundera