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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 In 2019, he regained his Czech citizenship after it had been revoked in 1979.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

“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

“If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 50

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

Milan Kundera

“It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.”

Milan Kundera

Source: Farewell Waltz

“But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“All novels… are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

Milan Kundera

Source: The Art of the Novel

“We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”

Milan Kundera book The Festival of Insignificance

Source: The Festival of Insignificance

“And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.”

Milan Kundera book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety.

At any rate that afforded me some comfort.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)”

Milan Kundera

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)”

Milan Kundera The Joke

Source: The Joke

“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.”

Milan Kundera

“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

“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.”

Milan Kundera

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

Milan Kundera

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?”

Milan Kundera

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.”

Milan Kundera

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?”

Milan Kundera

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“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.”

Milan Kundera

“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.”

Milan Kundera

Source: Farewell Waltz

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

Milan Kundera

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