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Milan Kundera

91 quotes

“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven (Viking, 1988, ), pp. 217-218
“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Novel and Europe" New York Review of Books (19 July 1984)
“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 (1929–2023) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From The Art of the Novel, as quoted in "Here Be Dragons", The Daily Telegraph (4 June 1988)
“Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 7
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Doug Gelbert, The Canine Hiker's Bible (2000), p. 8
“Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Optimism is the opium of the people.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first step in liquidating a people," said Hubl, "is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. "Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is our freedom.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source