Mean Quotes by Milan Kundera

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

— Milan Kundera

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

— Milan Kundera

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not…

— Milan Kundera

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world…

— Milan Kundera

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas

— Milan Kundera

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

— Milan Kundera

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of…

— Milan Kundera

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for…

— Milan Kundera

“We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realise what…

— Milan Kundera

Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or…

— Milan Kundera

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country…

— Milan Kundera

But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum…

— Milan Kundera

Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the…

— Milan Kundera

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the…

— Milan Kundera

From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal?…Betrayal…

— Milan Kundera

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it…

— Milan Kundera

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what…

— Milan Kundera

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of…

— Milan Kundera

Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed…

— Milan Kundera

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone…

— Milan Kundera

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about…

— Milan Kundera

The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract'…

— Milan Kundera

The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that…

— Milan Kundera