Milan Kundera Quotes

198 Quotes on Love, Friendship, and Human Nature – Wisdom for a Fresh Perspective

Identity (1998), p. 78

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Identity (1998), pg 63

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 10
Variant: Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Pg 5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

Variant: He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Pg 82
Identity (1998)

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: Farewell Waltz

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Part Four: Lost Letters (p. 106)
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Context: The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"
The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: Encounter

As quoted in The Canine Hiker's Bible (2000) by Doug Gelbert, p. 8

pg 71
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

Source: Ignorance

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight, p. 4

pg 27
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Context: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Identity (1998), p 40

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 59

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Context: What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Context: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 22)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Context: People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. 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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Context: Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 22)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Context: People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. 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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Context: 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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, pg 37

Identity (1998), p 146

Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 7
Context: Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 8
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 111
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Three: Words Misunderstood

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, pg 48

Source: Laughable Loves

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Joke

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Three: Words Misunderstood

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: Laughable Loves

Source: Life is Elsewhere

Source: Laughable Loves

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 40
Source: Identity (1998)

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: Identity

Source: Laughable Loves

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: Laughable Loves

Source: Immortality