Milan Kundera Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

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
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
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

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
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
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

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

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
Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.

Milan Kundera
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

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

Milan Kundera
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Milan Kundera
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

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

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

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

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