Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

454. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

459. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

461. “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

462. “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

463. “Everyone is wrong about the future.”

— Milan Kundera

464. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

467. “To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.”

— Milan Kundera

468. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

470. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.”

— Milan Kundera

477. “Love is the glorification of the present.”

— Milan Kundera

478. “She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.”

— Milan Kundera

479. “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

480. “I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.”

— Milan Kundera

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “If every life is unique, let’s live uniquely. Let’s reject everything that is not fresh and new. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.”

— Milan Kundera

494. “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

495. “If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.”

— Milan Kundera

496. “The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So, during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes focused on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.”

— Milan Kundera

497. “You must understand that by this time the only choice was among several varieties of defeat, but the town in question rejected compromise and would settle for nothing but victory. That was not reason talking; that was the voice of litost!”

— Milan Kundera

498. “A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love’s retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don’t want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie’s being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

500. “From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood.”

— Milan Kundera