Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .”

— Milan Kundera

302. “It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything – love, convictions, faith, history – no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”

— Milan Kundera

303. “Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.”

— Milan Kundera

304. “Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.”

— Milan Kundera

305. “La persona que desea abandonar el lugar en donde vive no es feliz.”

— Milan Kundera

306. “Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.”

— Milan Kundera

307. “For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.”

— Milan Kundera

308. “Laughing deeply is living deeply.”

— Milan Kundera

309. “If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?”

— Milan Kundera

310. “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

311. “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.”

— Milan Kundera

312. “And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their meaning lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.”

— Milan Kundera

313. “The greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure.”

— Milan Kundera

314. “Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”

— Milan Kundera

315. “The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.”

— Milan Kundera

316. “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.”

— Milan Kundera

317. “The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.”

— Milan Kundera

318. “The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood’s lost steps.”

— Milan Kundera

319. “They love their bodies. We neglected ours. They love to travel. We stayed put. They love adventure. We spent all our time at meetings. They love jazz. We were satisfied with pale imitations of folk music. They’re interested in themselves. We wanted to save the world and with our messianic vision nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their egotism will be the ones to save it.”

— Milan Kundera

320. “We won’t understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.”

— Milan Kundera

321. “A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life – these were the gifts she had left him.”

— Milan Kundera

322. “But all he could think of was what Sabina would have said about it. Everything he did, he did for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it done. It was a perfectly innocent form of infidelity and one eminently suited to Franz, who would never have done his bespectacled student-mistress any harm. He nourished the cult of Sabina more as a religion than as love.”

— Milan Kundera

323. “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

324. “He felt responsible for his fate, but his fate felt no responsibility for him.”

— Milan Kundera

325. “People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

— Milan Kundera

326. “Si algo hay que realmente me ha disgustado del hombre es la forma en que su crueldad, su bajeza y su estrechez de miras se disfrazan de lirismo.”

— Milan Kundera

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live.”

— Milan Kundera

332. “We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

— Milan Kundera

333. “A man able to think isn’t defeated – even when he is defeated.”

— Milan Kundera

334. “Is it right to raise one’s voice when others are being silenced? Yes.”

— Milan Kundera

335. “Elisabeth, can’t you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn’t go to bed with him?”

— Milan Kundera

336. “Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.”

— Milan Kundera

337. “It is entirely possible,” said Tomas, “that a female dog addressed continually by a male name will develop lesbian tendencies.”

— Milan Kundera

338. “Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.”

— Milan Kundera

339. “The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.”

— Milan Kundera

340. “Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.”

— Milan Kundera

341. “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

342. “The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy.”

— Milan Kundera

343. “I think, therefore I am’ is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”

— Milan Kundera

344. “People thought up the idea that animals don’t have the same capability of suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn’t bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror, and nothing but horror.”

— Milan Kundera

345. “By writing books, a man turns into a universe.”

— Milan Kundera

346. “A person’s destiny often ends before his death.”

— Milan Kundera

347. “Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love.”

— Milan Kundera

348. “He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned never to say another sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse with that orgiastic thunder of music. And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell asleep.”

— Milan Kundera

349. “But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?”

— Milan Kundera

350. “Certainty. Life’s last and kindest gift.”

— Milan Kundera