Milan Kundera Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

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
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

Milan Kundera
All man's life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others.

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

Milan Kundera
All of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others.

Milan Kundera
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Milan Kundera
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
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
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
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

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

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

Milan Kundera
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

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

Milan Kundera