Milan Kundera Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

Milan Kundera
Like parodies of themselves, theological notions are reflected in the triviality of our lives.

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
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Milan Kundera
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
None among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Milan Kundera
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
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
To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

Milan Kundera
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera
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
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
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
You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.

Milan Kundera
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
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
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces.

Milan Kundera
A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Milan Kundera
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
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
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
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
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
The reason we write books is that our kids don't give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

Milan Kundera
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Milan Kundera
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

Milan Kundera
But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Milan Kundera
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.

Milan Kundera
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

Milan Kundera
"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

Milan Kundera