Milan Kundera Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Milan Kundera
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
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
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
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
Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

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

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

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

Milan Kundera
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

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
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
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
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 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