Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

355. “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

356. “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

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. “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

360. “When he asked her why she was so silent, she told him she had not been satisfied with their lovemaking. She said he had made love to her like an intellectual.”

— Milan Kundera

361. “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

362. “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

363. “She knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.”

— Milan Kundera

364. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

366. “For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”

— Milan Kundera

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

376. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “No matter what people say, life is marvelous, if you want to know who gets mu goats, it’s those killjoy pessimists, even if I have plenty to complain about, you don’t hear a peep out of me, what for. I ask you, what for, when life can bring me a day like today; oh, how marvelous it all is: a strange town, and me here with you...”

— Milan Kundera

386. “She looked at him with love in her eyes, but she feared the night ahead, feared her dreams. Her life was split. Both day and night were competing for her.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

388. “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

389. “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

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. “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

392. “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

393. “In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

395. “Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?”

— Milan Kundera

396. “It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules.”

— Milan Kundera

397. “Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

399. “If you don’t care about the destination, you don’t ask where you’re going.”

— Milan Kundera

400. “Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.”

— Milan Kundera