Milan Kundera: Quotes about love

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

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“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.”

Milan Kundera book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

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

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“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?”

Milan Kundera

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“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.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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

“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Variant: He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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

“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

“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 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