Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• a man possessed with peace is always smiling
• ... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic…
• ...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender…
• He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely…
• Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
• The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
• Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist…
• Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given…
• When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into…
• I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
• But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life!…
• Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to…
• Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand…
• Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but…
• Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)
• Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
• The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said?…
• If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee…
• Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
• Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but…

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