Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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, its maladies, its manias – constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal.”

— Milan Kundera

252. “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

253. “People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they’re talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.”

— Milan Kundera

254. “So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.”

— Milan Kundera

255. “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

256. “Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”

— Milan Kundera

257. “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

258. “In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.”

— Milan Kundera

259. “She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It differentiated her from the others.”

— Milan Kundera

260. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

263. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

271. “But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

273. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

285. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

287. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

290. “That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us.”

— Milan Kundera

291. “Suicide is worse than murder. One can murder for vengeance or out of greed, but even greed is the expression of a perverted love of life. But to commit suicide is to throw one’s life down contemptuously at God’s feet.”

— Milan Kundera

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

295. “Now we can understand the meaning of Tereza’s secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the mirror. It was a battle with her mother. It was a longing to be a body unlike other bodies, to find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the soul charging up from below. It was not an easy task: her soul – her sad, timid, self-effacing soul – lay concealed in the depths of her bowels and was ashamed to show itself.”

— Milan Kundera

296. “How goodness heightens beauty!”

— Milan Kundera

297. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

299. “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

300. “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