Milan Kundera Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milan Kundera
The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milan Kundera
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milan Kundera
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milan Kundera