Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “He reflected that he had only one life and that he wanted to live it somewhere else.”

— Milan Kundera

402. “How can she explain to Gustaf that within the magic circle of maternal energy, Irena has never manage to rule over her own life? How can she explain that the constant proximity of the mother would throw her back, into her weakness, her immaturity?”

— Milan Kundera

403. “The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.”

— Milan Kundera

404. “What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?”

— Milan Kundera

405. “I have become so pessimistic that these days I’d even choose the truth over friendship.”

— Milan Kundera

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.”

— Milan Kundera

410. “The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.”

— Milan Kundera

411. “The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

— Milan Kundera

412. “She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.”

— Milan Kundera

413. “We live in two different dimensions, you and I.”

— Milan Kundera

414. “What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man’s hatred for man justifies its crimes.”

— Milan Kundera

415. “Extremele marcheaza frontierele in spatele carora viata inceteaza, iar pasiunea extremismului, in arta si in politica, este dorinta camuflata de a muri.”

— Milan Kundera

416. “Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.”

— Milan Kundera

417. “Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions.”

— Milan Kundera

418. “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

419. “I’ve always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won’t believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years.”

— Milan Kundera

420. “Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer’s faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.”

— Milan Kundera

421. “I’d never recited poetry to anyone before; I’ve never done it since. I have a highly sensitive, built-in fuse mechanism that keeps me from opening up too far, from revealing my feelings, and reciting poetry makes me feel as though I’m talking about my feelings and standing on one leg at the same time.”

— Milan Kundera

422. “Alas, I found no guarantee I would have acted any better; but how has that affected my relationship with others? The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.”

— Milan Kundera

423. “Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

— Milan Kundera

424. “His kindness tore at her heartstrings...”

— Milan Kundera

425. “The man of fantasy must become the man of action, the adventure of dreams the adventure of life.”

— Milan Kundera

426. “To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one’s own seriousness.”

— Milan Kundera

427. “If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a “myth,” that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.”

— Milan Kundera

428. “She was amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

430. “He knew perfectly well that his petition would not help the prisoners. His true goal was not to free to prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist.”

— Milan Kundera

431. “A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions.”

— Milan Kundera

432. “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.”

— Milan Kundera

433. “The entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout ‘We are all writers!’ For everyone is pained with the thought of disappearing, unheard, and unseen into an indifferent universe and because of that, everyone wants, wither there’s still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.”

— Milan Kundera

434. “Oh, all that was so far away, almost forgotten. But during her mother’s five-day stay in Paris, that feeling of inferiority, of weakness, of dependency came over her again.”

— Milan Kundera

435. “The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?”

— Milan Kundera

436. “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.”

— Milan Kundera

437. “On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop’s cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.”

— Milan Kundera

438. “Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.”

— Milan Kundera

439. “Everyone is wrong about the future.”

— Milan Kundera

440. “The best actors do not let the wheels show.”

— Milan Kundera

441. “We wanted to destroy the world. With our messianism we nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their selfishness will save it.”

— Milan Kundera

442. “And he reflected that one cannot completely become his own self until one is completely among others.”

— Milan Kundera

443. “The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.”

— Milan Kundera

444. “The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.”

— Milan Kundera

445. “Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.”

— Milan Kundera

446. “Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.”

— Milan Kundera

447. “Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what’s most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. 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, it maladies, its manias.”

— Milan Kundera

448. “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

449. “When a woman doesn’t live sufficiently through her body, she comes to see the body as an enemy.”

— Milan Kundera

450. “The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.”

— Milan Kundera