Top 500 Milan Kundera Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

412. “He reflected that he had only one life and that he wanted to live it somewhere else.”

— Milan Kundera

413. “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

414. “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

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. “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

418. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

423. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

425. “Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

427. “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

428. “Not until later did she understand that the word “woman” on which he had placed such uncommon emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one of the two human sexes; it represented a value. Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.”

— Milan Kundera

429. “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

430. “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

431. “But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life!”

— Milan Kundera

432. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

436. “Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”

— Milan Kundera

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

440. “Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.”

— Milan Kundera

441. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

443. “The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I... ” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.”

— Milan Kundera

444. “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

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

— Milan Kundera

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “Everyone is wrong about the future.”

— Milan Kundera