Milan Kundera: Trending quotes

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Milan Kundera: 396 quotes10 likes

“The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.”

Milan Kundera book Slowness

Source: Slowness

“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”

Milan Kundera

“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 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“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 book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

“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.”

Milan Kundera

“Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 129
Source: Identity (1998)

“Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)”

Milan Kundera

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.”

Milan Kundera

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Optimism is the opium of the people.”

Milan Kundera The Joke

Source: The Joke (1967)

“I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.”

Milan Kundera

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”

Milan Kundera book Encounter

Source: Encounter

“I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”

Milan Kundera