Milan Kundera Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

Milan Kundera
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, ahistorical accidents, soon forgotten.

Milan Kundera
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
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
The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel.

Milan Kundera
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Milan Kundera
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

Milan Kundera
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
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

Milan Kundera
Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

Milan Kundera
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
A man able to think isn't defeated—even when he is defeated.

Milan Kundera
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

Milan Kundera
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

Milan Kundera
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Milan Kundera
Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Milan Kundera
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
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.

Milan Kundera
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
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
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Milan Kundera
The gaze of a man has often been described. It seems to fasten coldly on the woman, as if it were measuring, weighing, evaluating, choosing her, as if, in other words, it were turning her into a thing.

Milan Kundera
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
This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.

Milan Kundera
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Milan Kundera
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
"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."

Milan Kundera