Milan Kundera: Quotes about life

Milan Kundera was Czech author of Czech and French literature. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Milan Kundera: 396   quotes 10   likes

“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
Life , Perfection

“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life , Freedom , Happiness

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 8
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

Life

“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

Life

“He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Love , Life , Time

“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Part Four: Lost Letters (p. 106)
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Context: The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"
The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Life , Age , Understanding , Universe

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

Life , Law , Beauty , Time

“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

Life , Sadness

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life , World

“For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Life , Women , Men , Secret

“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

Life , Beauty

“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

Life , Death , Time

“Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that is merits being duplicated.”

Milan Kundera

Source: Farewell Waltz

Life

“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

Life , Change

“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

Life , Passion

“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

Life

“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)

Life

“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)

Life , War , People , History