Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.”

— Milan Kundera

52. “A constant interrogation.”

— Milan Kundera

53. “Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue – perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”

— Milan Kundera

54. “We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”

— Milan Kundera

55. “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

— Milan Kundera

56. “And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

— Milan Kundera

57. “No love can survive muteness.”

— Milan Kundera

58. “To laugh is to live profoundly.”

— Milan Kundera

59. “I have a strong will to love you for eternity.”

— Milan Kundera

60. “The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.”

— Milan Kundera

61. “Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”

— Milan Kundera

62. “You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”

— Milan Kundera

63. “Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”

— Milan Kundera

64. “To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.”

— Milan Kundera

65. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

— Milan Kundera

66. “Mankind’s real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.”

— Milan Kundera

67. “In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood.”

— Milan Kundera

68. “Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.”

— Milan Kundera

69. “I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.”

— Milan Kundera

70. “Pain doesn’t listen to reason, it has it’s own reason, which is not reasonable.”

— Milan Kundera

71. “Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.”

— Milan Kundera

72. “In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.”

— Milan Kundera

73. “A man is responsible for his ignorance.”

— Milan Kundera

74. “It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”

— Milan Kundera

75. “The first step in liquidating a people,′ said Hubl, ’is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

— Milan Kundera

76. “For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.”

— Milan Kundera

77. “All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”

— Milan Kundera

78. “People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.”

— Milan Kundera

79. “The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.”

— Milan Kundera

80. “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.”

— Milan Kundera

81. “When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.”

— Milan Kundera

82. “Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.”

— Milan Kundera

83. “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”

— Milan Kundera

84. “We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions – love, antipathy, charity, or malice – and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

— Milan Kundera

85. “Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”

— Milan Kundera

86. “He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.”

— Milan Kundera

87. “The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.”

— Milan Kundera

88. “It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.”

— Milan Kundera

89. “The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.”

— Milan Kundera

90. “I have no mission. No one has.”

— Milan Kundera

91. “To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.”

— Milan Kundera

92. “A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

— Milan Kundera

93. “What I need most of all is certainty.”

— Milan Kundera

94. “A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

— Milan Kundera

95. “The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.”

— Milan Kundera

96. “Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

— Milan Kundera

97. “Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.”

— Milan Kundera

98. “Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.”

— Milan Kundera

99. “The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.”

— Milan Kundera

100. “She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.”

— Milan Kundera