The Best Milan Kundera quotes

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

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman. — Milan Kundera

When a woman doesn’t live sufficiently through her body, she comes to see the body as an enemy. — Milan Kundera

Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman. — Milan Kundera

A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self–deceptions. — Milan Kundera

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

What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure… To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it. — Milan Kundera

In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable. — Milan Kundera

Aren’t we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women? — Milan Kundera

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake. — Milan Kundera

She knew she was being unfair…; she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how. — Milan Kundera

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 — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. — Milan Kundera

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice. — Milan Kundera

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

Yes, it’s crazy. Love is either crazy or it’s nothing at all. — Milan Kundera

Physical love is unthinkable without violence. — Milan Kundera

Because love is continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love. — Milan Kundera

Love is a constant interrogation. — Milan Kundera

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

There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence. — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor — Milan Kundera

Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away. — Milan Kundera

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful. — Milan Kundera

Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves. — Milan Kundera

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

Love is a battle, and I plan to go on fighting. To the end. — Milan Kundera

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. — Milan Kundera

At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love. — Milan Kundera

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

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden. — Milan Kundera

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

Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had. — Milan Kundera

A single metaphor can give birth to love. — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are dangerous, Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. — Milan Kundera

Beauty is a rebellion against time. — Milan Kundera

Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. — Milan Kundera

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

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

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. — Milan Kundera

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere. — Milan Kundera

Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. — Milan Kundera

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

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

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. — Milan Kundera

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. — Milan Kundera

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. — Milan Kundera

Radio… force–feeds us music… everywhere and all the time… sewage–water music in which music is dying. — Milan Kundera

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics. — Milan Kundera

Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time. — Milan Kundera

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. — Milan Kundera

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

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

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

W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory. — Milan Kundera

Even painful memories are ties that bind. — Milan Kundera

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. — Milan Kundera

Children, Never look Back!’ and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles. — Milan Kundera

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting. — Milan Kundera

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. — Milan Kundera

Existential mathematics…) the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. — P. 39

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. — Milan Kundera

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs. — Milan Kundera

Man’s world is the planet of inexperience. — Milan Kundera

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. — 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

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. — Milan Kundera

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. — Milan Kundera

If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world. — 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

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

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

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? — Milan Kundera

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

Adventure, the first great theme of the novel. — Milan Kundera

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. — Milan Kundera

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

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero? — Milan Kundera

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. — Milan Kundera

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. — Milan Kundera

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious–think of Cervantes! — Milan Kundera

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. — Milan Kundera

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

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

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. — Milan Kundera

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

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. — Milan Kundera

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. — Milan Kundera

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. — Milan Kundera

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

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

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. — Milan Kundera

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. — Milan Kundera

The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. — Milan Kundera

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. — Milan Kundera