Milan Kundera: Living

Milan Kundera was Czech author of Czech and French literature. Explore interesting quotes on living.
Milan Kundera: 396 quotes10 likes

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 27
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

Milan Kundera

“As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Identity (1998), p 146

“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”

Milan Kundera

“To laugh is to live profoundly.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

Milan Kundera

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“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

“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

“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

“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)