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

Explore Milan Kundera's profound quotes on love, friendship, and human nature. Each quote offers wisdom, leaving readers with a fresh perspective on life.

Milan Kundera was a Czech-French novelist known for his novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." He moved to France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981. Despite facing censorship from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution, Kundera achieved international recognition and received numerous awards, including the Jerusalem Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2019, he regained his Czech citizenship after it had been revoked in 1979. Kundera led a private life and was rarely seen in public or interviewed by the media. His works showcased his background in music, incorporating musical influences and references throughout.

Born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera came from a middle-class family. His father was an esteemed musicologist and pianist, while his mother worked as an educator. Influenced by his father's musical talents, Kundera learned to play the piano and pursued musicology and composition studies. However, his musical aspirations were hindered due to familial circumstances. At the age of eighteen, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia but was later expelled in 1950. Kundera then pursued studies at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague but lost his job after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Despite facing challenges throughout his life, Milan Kundera's literary works continue to resonate with readers worldwide.

✵ 1. April 1929 – 11. July 2023
Milan Kundera photo
Milan Kundera: 198 quotes10 likes

Milan Kundera Quotes

“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”

Milan Kundera book Encounter

Source: Encounter

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p 49

“I have no mission. No one has.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 160
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Four: Soul and Body

“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), as quoted in Milan Kundera (2003) by Harold Bloom, [//books.google.it/books?id=SXDojRJFMPIC&pg=PA91 p. 91]
Context: True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

“She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”

Milan Kundera

“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Milan Kundera

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

Milan Kundera book Slowness

Source: Slowness

“Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Variant: ... because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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