Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “Not until later did she understand that the word “woman” on which he had placed such uncommon emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one of the two human sexes; it represented a value. Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.”

— Milan Kundera

458. “The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It’s important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

461. “What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”

— Milan Kundera

462. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

464. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

467. “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

468. “Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.”

— Milan Kundera

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

475. “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? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life!”

— Milan Kundera

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

480. “Her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty”.”

— 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. “She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women.”

— Milan Kundera

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

499. “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

500. “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