Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Business only has two functions – innovation and marketing.”

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Marketing Quotes, Innovation Quotes

2. “Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.”

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Romantic Quotes, New Relationship Quotes, Short Love Quotes for Her, Short Love Quotes for Him

3. “At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.”

— Milan Kundera

4. “Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Quotes About Humanity, Quotes About Veganism

5. “Speak truth to power.”

— Milan Kundera

6. “There is no perfection, only life.”

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Perfection Quotes

7. “The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

— Milan Kundera

8. “Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”

— Milan Kundera

9. “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.”

— Milan Kundera

10. “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”

— Milan Kundera

11. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

13. “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

14. “The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.”

— Milan Kundera

15. “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.”

— Milan Kundera

16. “Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”

— Milan Kundera

17. “A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”

— Milan Kundera

18. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

20. “Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.”

— Milan Kundera

21. “I find myself fascinating.”

— Milan Kundera

22. “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.”

— Milan Kundera

23. “Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.”

— Milan Kundera

24. “Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.”

— Milan Kundera

25. “Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.”

— Milan Kundera

26. “And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

27. “Happiness is the longing for repetition.”

— Milan Kundera

28. “The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.”

— Milan Kundera

29. “Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.”

— Milan Kundera

30. “Yes, it’s crazy. Love is either crazy or it’s nothing at all.”

— Milan Kundera

31. “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

32. “In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”

— Milan Kundera

33. “Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.”

— Milan Kundera

34. “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

35. “Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “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

38. “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

40. “Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!”

— Milan Kundera

41. “Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.”

— Milan Kundera

42. “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

43. “He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

— Milan Kundera

44. “The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.”

— Milan Kundera

45. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

46. “Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.”

— Milan Kundera

47. “I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

49. “Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.”

— Milan Kundera

50. “Es muss sein. Es muss sein.”

— Milan Kundera