Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “You think that just because it’s already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.”

— Milan Kundera

252. “The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.”

— Milan Kundera

253. “I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.”

— Milan Kundera

254. “To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning.”

— Milan Kundera

255. “Yes, it’s a well-known fact about you: you’re like death, you take everything.”

— Milan Kundera

256. “Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”

— Milan Kundera

257. “Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.”

— Milan Kundera

258. “Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.”

— Milan Kundera

259. “She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn’t possibly hurt her.”

— Milan Kundera

260. “He was repelled by the pettiness that reduced life to mere existence and that turned men into half-men. He wanted to lay his life on a balance, the other side of which was weighted with death. He wanted to make his every action, every day, yes, every hour and minute worthy of being measured against the ultimate, which is death.”

— Milan Kundera

261. “The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.”

— Milan Kundera

262. “There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.”

— Milan Kundera

263. “Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.”

— Milan Kundera

264. “He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.”

— Milan Kundera

265. “Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.”

— Milan Kundera

266. “Even painful memories are ties that bind.”

— Milan Kundera

267. “Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future.”

— Milan Kundera

268. “Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”

— Milan Kundera

269. “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”

— Milan Kundera

270. “Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”

— Milan Kundera

271. “The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. If we cannot change the world, let’s at least change our lives and live them freely.”

— Milan Kundera

272. “Isn’t beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?”

— Milan Kundera

273. “The goals we pursue are always veiled... The thing that gives us our every move its meaning is always unknown to us.”

— Milan Kundera

274. “Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.”

— Milan Kundera

275. “Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge.”

— Milan Kundera

276. “Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.”

— Milan Kundera

277. “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

— Milan Kundera

278. “I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect.”

— Milan Kundera

279. “It’s not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it’s your friends.”

— Milan Kundera

280. “How goodness heightens beauty!”

— Milan Kundera

281. “Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”

— Milan Kundera

282. “Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.”

— Milan Kundera

283. “If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: “The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.”

— Milan Kundera

284. “Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven’s Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the ‘Ode to Joy’ that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.”

— Milan Kundera

285. “He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.”

— Milan Kundera

286. “The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”

— Milan Kundera

287. “If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.”

— Milan Kundera

288. “Franz could not accept that the fact that the glory of the Grand March was equal to the comic vanity of its marchers.”

— Milan Kundera

289. “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 one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power... All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.”

— Milan Kundera

290. “Each interpreted the other’s words in his own way, and the lived in perfect harmony, the perfect solidarity of perfect Mutual misunderstanding.”

— Milan Kundera

291. “This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

— Milan Kundera

292. “Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.”

— Milan Kundera

293. “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”

— Milan Kundera

294. “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

— Milan Kundera

295. “No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we’d rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn’t know how to deal with women.”

— Milan Kundera

296. “Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.”

— Milan Kundera

297. “Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”

— Milan Kundera

298. “Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child.”

— Milan Kundera

299. “The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.”

— Milan Kundera

300. “People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.”

— Milan Kundera