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
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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
MILAN KUNDERA QUOTES ABOUT TIME
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
Redundant Thematics In Milan Kundera Statements body
woman
human
novel
world
love
happiness
time
life
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
MILAN KUNDERA QUOTES ON MEMORY
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
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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
MILAN KUNDERA QUOTES ABOUT THE WORLD
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
MILAN KUNDERA QUOTES ON NOVEL
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
MILAN KUNDERA QUOTES ON HUMAN BEINGS
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. — Milan Kundera
VIDEO
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