Milan Kundera: Man

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

“In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Pg 5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“A man is responsible for his ignorance.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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

“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)

“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)