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Milan Kundera

91 quotes

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Harold Bloom, Milan Kundera (2003), [//books.google.it/books?id=SXDojRJFMPIC&pg=PA91 p. 91]
“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word, change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. what is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No love can survive muteness.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Early in the novel [Anna Karenina], Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition — the same motif appears at the beginning and the end — may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. ... But 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
“The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. ... Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source