Milan Kundera: Trending quotes

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Milan Kundera: 396 quotes10 likes

“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them 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.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.”

Source: Farewell Waltz

“Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)”

Milan Kundera The Joke

Source: The Joke

“No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p 56

“But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Three: Words Misunderstood, Ch. 10

“She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Identity (1998)

“This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 10
Identity (1998)

“Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.”

Milan Kundera book Slowness

Slowness (1995)

“Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 33
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.”

Milan Kundera The Joke

Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým.
The Joke (1967)

“Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”

Milan Kundera The Joke

The Joke (1967)

“Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 146
Identity (1998)

“Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 28
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 208
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 20
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight