Milan Kundera Quotes

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.”

“The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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."”

“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.”

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

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