Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

354. “A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.”

— Milan Kundera

355. “Tutti noi consideriamo impensabile che l’amore della nostra vita possa essere qualcosa di leggero, qualcosa che non ha peso; riteniamo che il nostro amore sia qualcosa che doveva necessariamente essere; che senza di esso la nostra vita non sarebbe stata la nostra vita. Ci sembra che Beethoven, in persona, torvo e scapigliato, suoni al nostro grande amore il suo “Es muss sein!”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

357. “Silence lay between them like an agony.”

— Milan Kundera

358. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

360. “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

361. “It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier, seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense.”

— Milan Kundera

362. “He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.”

— Milan Kundera

363. “I know you’re quiet a workman on God’s eternal construction site and don’t like hearing about demolition, but what can I do? Myself, I’m not one of God’s bricklayers. Besides, if God’s bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we’d be able to demolish them. But instead of walls all I see is stage sets. And stage sets are made to be demolished.”

— Milan Kundera

364. “I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.”

— Milan Kundera

365. “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

366. “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

367. “What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”

— Milan Kundera

368. “The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.”

— Milan Kundera

369. “Whe you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief requires a tremendous effort and the proper training.”

— Milan Kundera

370. “The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.”

— Milan Kundera

371. “In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

— Milan Kundera

372. “Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

374. “Solo como un cuadro de Van Gogh bajo la mirada idiota de los turistas. Solo como la Luna que nadie ve.”

— Milan Kundera

375. “Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.”

— Milan Kundera

376. “The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about.”

— Milan Kundera

377. “All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.”

— Milan Kundera

378. “The only thing that makes me somewhat sceptical regarding human procreation is the unintelligent selection of parents. Some of the most unattractive individuals in the world feel they must multiply at all costs. They are apparently under the illusion that the burden of ugliness becomes lighter if it is shared with descendants.”

— Milan Kundera

379. “She came from a land where revolutionary illusion had long since faded but where the thing he admired most in revolution remained: life on a large scale; a life of risk, daring, and the danger of death. Sabina had renewed his faith in the grandeur of human endeavour. Superimposing the painful drama of her country on her person, he found her even more beautiful.”

— Milan Kundera

380. “There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”

— Milan Kundera

381. “Tamina feels that the eyes of a single outsider are enough to destroy the worth of her personal diaries, while Goethe thinks that if a single individual fails to set eyes on his lines, that individual calls his–Goethe’s–entire existence into question. The difference between Tamina and Goethe is the difference between human being and writer.”

— Milan Kundera

382. “First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life.”

— Milan Kundera

383. “She fixed him with a long careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony’s intelligent sparkle.”

— Milan Kundera

384. “Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.”

— Milan Kundera

385. “Atunci am inteles semnificatia magica a cercului. Cand iesi din rand mai poti reveni. Randul este o formatiune deschisa. Cercul insa se inchide, si-l parasesti fara posibilitatea intoarcerii.”

— Milan Kundera

386. “The scene taking place illustrates an immemorial error of men: having appropriated the role of seducers, they never even consider any women but the ones they might desire; the idea doesn’t occur to them that a woman who is ugly or old, or who simply stands outside their own erotic imaginings, might want to possess them.”

— Milan Kundera

387. “Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed.”

— Milan Kundera

388. “Jetzt hatte sie begriffen! Wer sich erinnern will, darf nicht an einem Ort verweilen und warten, bis die Erinnerungen von selbst kommen! Die Erinnerungen haben sich in alle Himmelsrichtungen verstreut, und man muss reisen, wenn man sie wiederfinden und aus ihren Schlupfwinkeln holen will!”

— Milan Kundera

389. “It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.”

— Milan Kundera

390. “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... 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. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”

— Milan Kundera

391. “Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the momemnt he penetrated sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, vision less; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us.”

— Milan Kundera

392. “Aren’t we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”

— Milan Kundera

393. “Don’t forget that not only was Socrates ugly but also that many famous women lovers did not distinguish themselves at all by their physical perfection. Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us.”

— Milan Kundera

394. “The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.”

— Milan Kundera

395. “Love is a battle?” said Franz. “Well, I don’t feel at all like fighting.” And he left.”

— Milan Kundera

396. “The humble histories of hearts cannot be brushed aside forever by the great events of nations.”

— Milan Kundera

397. “I have to lie, if I don’t want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself.”

— Milan Kundera

398. “The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It’s important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.”

— Milan Kundera

399. “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.”

— Milan Kundera

400. “The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.”

— Milan Kundera