Milan Kundera: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us… Only chance can speak to us.”

“Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

“I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.”

“"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.”

“To laugh is to live profoundly.”

“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”

“Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.”

“A man is responsible for his ignorance.”

“Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.”

“Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.”

“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”

“Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
Love is a battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting." And he left.”

“How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?”

“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

“… no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”

“The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.”

“The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.”