Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.”

— Milan Kundera

152. “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”

— Milan Kundera

153. “Whether it’s good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.”

— Milan Kundera

154. “Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.”

— Milan Kundera

155. “Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”

— Milan Kundera

156. “Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.”

— Milan Kundera

157. “But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today’s world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.”

— Milan Kundera

158. “Los cuerpos desnudos y mojados de las mujeres se empujaban impacientes para ver de cerca la muerte, para verla en una cara familiar, conocida.”

— Milan Kundera

159. “Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.”

— Milan Kundera

160. “Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Teraza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and a lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.”

— Milan Kundera

161. “Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”

— Milan Kundera

162. “By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, “it,” he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.”

— Milan Kundera

163. “Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.”

— Milan Kundera

164. “They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it.”

— Milan Kundera

165. “When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.”

— Milan Kundera

166. “Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. 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. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.”

— Milan Kundera

167. “She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body’s surface of its terrible, basic importance.”

— Milan Kundera

168. “Is not parody the eternal lot of man?”

— Milan Kundera

169. “The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.”

— Milan Kundera

170. “Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.”

— Milan Kundera

171. “The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!”

— Milan Kundera

172. “Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?”

— Milan Kundera

173. “Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections.”

— Milan Kundera

174. “When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?”

— Milan Kundera

175. “The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka’s posthumous death begins.”

— Milan Kundera

176. “Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.”

— Milan Kundera

177. “The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.”

— Milan Kundera

178. “The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.”

— Milan Kundera

179. “How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?”

— Milan Kundera

180. “La tristeza era la forma y la felicidad, el contenido. La felicidad llenaba el espacio de la tristeza.”

— Milan Kundera

181. “Children, Never look Back!” and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”

— Milan Kundera

182. “If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

— Milan Kundera

183. “Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.”

— Milan Kundera

184. “To be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one’s grave diggers.”

— Milan Kundera

185. “It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.” -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76.”

— Milan Kundera

186. “This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.”

— Milan Kundera

187. “Beauty is a rebellion against time.”

— Milan Kundera

188. “When music plays, we hear the melody, forgetting that it is only one of the modes of time; when the orchestra falls silent, we hear time; time itself.”

— Milan Kundera

189. “Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”

— Milan Kundera

190. “In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.”

— Milan Kundera

191. “The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.”

— Milan Kundera

192. “The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.”

— Milan Kundera

193. “Dogs are our link to paradise.”

— Milan Kundera

194. “No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

— Milan Kundera

195. “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”

— Milan Kundera

196. “The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

— Milan Kundera

197. “My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”

— Milan Kundera

198. “What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.”

— Milan Kundera

199. “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.”

— Milan Kundera

200. “How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.”

— Milan Kundera