Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.”

— Milan Kundera

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

307. “All human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea.”

— Milan Kundera

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.”

— Milan Kundera

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.”

— Milan Kundera

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

332. “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

333. “I regimi criminali non furono creati da criminali ma da entusiasti, convinti di aver scoperto l’unica strada per il paradiso. Essi difesero con coraggio questa strada, giustiziando per questo molte persone. In seguito, fu chiaro che il paradiso non esisteva e che gli entusiasti erano quindi degli assassini.”

— Milan Kundera

334. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

340. “Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? 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

341. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

345. “It would be so simple to find peace in the world of fantasy. But I’ve always tried to live in the two worlds at the same time without giving up one for the other. I must not give up the real world even though I am losing everything in it. Perhaps it will be enough in the end if I manage one thing. One last thing: To hand over my life as a clear message to the one person able to understand it and carry it on.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

347. “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

348. “Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

350. “And I felt fear. Fear of that bleak horizon, fear of that destiny. I felt my soul shriveling, I felt it retreating, and I was frightened by the thought that it could not escape its encirclement.”

— Milan Kundera