Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “And he reflected that one cannot completely become his own self until one is completely among others.”

— Milan Kundera

452. “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.”

— Milan Kundera

453. “She was amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment.”

— Milan Kundera

454. “Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”

— Milan Kundera

455. “The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I... ” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.”

— Milan Kundera

456. “The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.”

— Milan Kundera

457. “Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it.”

— Milan Kundera

458. “His kindness tore at her heartstrings...”

— Milan Kundera

459. “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.”

— Milan Kundera

460. “The entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout ‘We are all writers!’ For everyone is pained with the thought of disappearing, unheard, and unseen into an indifferent universe and because of that, everyone wants, wither there’s still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.”

— Milan Kundera

461. “If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a “myth,” that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.”

— Milan Kundera

462. “The man of fantasy must become the man of action, the adventure of dreams the adventure of life.”

— Milan Kundera

463. “Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while as a mistake.”

— Milan Kundera

464. “But no carnival can go on for ever.”

— Milan Kundera

465. “Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what’s most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, it maladies, its manias.”

— Milan Kundera

466. “The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.”

— Milan Kundera

467. “The children laughing without knowing why – isn’t that beautiful?”

— Milan Kundera

468. “A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful shell.”

— Milan Kundera

469. “He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.”

— Milan Kundera

470. “Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

472. “Jaromil had always regarded the future as an awesome mystery. It comprised everything unknown, and for that reason it lured and terrified. It was the opposite of certainty, the opposite of home.”

— Milan Kundera

473. “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

474. “I believe that in matters of the heart there is no such thing as compromise. Love means that you give each other everything.”

— Milan Kundera

Featured in: Romance Quotes

475. “Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: ‘I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.’ Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.”

— Milan Kundera

476. “Lermontov became a soldier, escaping from her grandmother and her troublesome love. He exchanged the pen, which is the key to one’s soul, for a pistol, which is the key to the gates of the world.”

— Milan Kundera

477. “The only explanation I can suggest is that for Franz, love was not an extension of public life but its antithesis. It meant a longing to put himself in the mercy of his partner. He who gives himself up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.”

— Milan Kundera

478. “Every situation is of man’s making and can only contain what man contains.”

— Milan Kundera

479. “And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict tat could occur between two Russians was a lovers’ misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each others’ arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.”

— Milan Kundera

480. “Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler’s concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?”

— Milan Kundera

481. “Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”

— Milan Kundera

482. “It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape.”

— Milan Kundera

483. “The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.”

— Milan Kundera

484. “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

485. “The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.”

— Milan Kundera

486. “She surrendered her body to the judgment of someone else’s eyes- and that was a source of anxious uncertainty.”

— Milan Kundera

487. “And that was exactly her gamble: that they’d accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a a naive young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she’s proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it’ll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won’t stay.”

— Milan Kundera

488. “This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment – beyond that boundary.”

— Milan Kundera

489. “Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot – he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza’s dream was something he could not endure.”

— Milan Kundera

490. “Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent a Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?”

— Milan Kundera

491. “All predictions are wrong, that’s one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment.”

— Milan Kundera

492. “She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting.”

— Milan Kundera

493. “Leroy interrupted Chantal’s fantasies: “Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You’re free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.”

— Milan Kundera

494. “It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.”

— Milan Kundera

495. “She saw her soul shinning through the features on her face.”

— Milan Kundera

496. “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

497. “And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.”

— Milan Kundera

498. “But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?”

— Milan Kundera

499. “A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue “something higher”- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books.”

— Milan Kundera

500. “It’s a great consolation to think that when we’ve long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth.”

— Milan Kundera