Milan Kundera: Trending quotes

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Milan Kundera: 396 quotes10 likes

“Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.”

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
Variant: For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Source: Identity

“If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him.”

“For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“what's the matter?" he asked
"nothing"
"what do you want me to do for you?"
"i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older"
what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”

“Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.”

Source: Farewell Waltz

“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?”

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure… To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.”

Source: Farewell Waltz

“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?”

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.”

Milan Kundera book Encounter

Source: Encounter

“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”