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 In 2019, he regained his Czech citizenship after it had been revoked in 1979.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

“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

“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”

Milan Kundera

As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988)

“I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 8
Identity (1998)

“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”

Milan Kundera

New York Review of Books (19 July 1984)

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Six: The Grand March, Ch. 29

“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 209
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 36
Identity (1998)

“No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”

Milan Kundera The Joke

The Joke (1967)

“For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“It was the call of all those fortuities… which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 51
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“No love can survive muteness.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 82
Identity (1998)

“Love is our freedom.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 236
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 137
Identity (1998)

“…[O]f a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, […] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 7)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)

“Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 82
Identity (1998)

“But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 46
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body