Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

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

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

— Milan Kundera

455. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

458. “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

459. “Everyone is wrong about the future.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— 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. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

465. “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

466. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera