Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous – like God!”

— Milan Kundera

102. “There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.”

— Milan Kundera

103. “Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced that they had discovered the road to paradise.”

— Milan Kundera

104. “Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.”

— Milan Kundera

105. “And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.”

— Milan Kundera

106. “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.”

— Milan Kundera

107. “Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.”

— Milan Kundera

108. “When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?”

— Milan Kundera

109. “Sad company is bad company.”

— Milan Kundera

110. “Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.”

— Milan Kundera

111. “A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”

— Milan Kundera

112. “For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”

— Milan Kundera

113. “She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

— Milan Kundera

114. “The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.”

— Milan Kundera

115. “Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.”

— Milan Kundera

116. “There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.”

— Milan Kundera

117. “Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.”

— Milan Kundera

118. “The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

— Milan Kundera

119. “Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.”

— Milan Kundera

120. “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.”

— Milan Kundera

121. “The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

— Milan Kundera

122. “Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

124. “Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.”

— Milan Kundera

125. “Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”

— Milan Kundera

126. “The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”

— Milan Kundera

127. “The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”

— Milan Kundera

128. “Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I’d like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.”

— Milan Kundera

129. “To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”

— Milan Kundera

130. “In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.”

— Milan Kundera

131. “Quien busque infinito, que cierre los ojos.”

— Milan Kundera

132. “For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.”

— Milan Kundera

133. “Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

— Milan Kundera

134. “But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.”

— Milan Kundera

135. “If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

— Milan Kundera

136. “Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”

— Milan Kundera

137. “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”

— Milan Kundera

138. “Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.”

— Milan Kundera

139. “When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.”

— Milan Kundera

140. “No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”

— Milan Kundera

141. “Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.”

— Milan Kundera

142. “It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries...”

— Milan Kundera

143. “Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.”

— Milan Kundera

144. “Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

— Milan Kundera

145. “But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?”

— Milan Kundera

146. “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

— Milan Kundera

147. “Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.”

— Milan Kundera

148. “Because I’m happy that you exist at all, Elisabeth. Perhaps I love you. Perhaps I love you very much. But probably just for this reason it would be better if we remain as we are. I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don’t live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness.”

— Milan Kundera

149. “The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

— Milan Kundera

150. “To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.”

— Milan Kundera