Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
• The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his…
• 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 contrary; in the…
• I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who…
• She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
• 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…
• But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
• Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?
• ...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral…
• The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after…
• The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is…
• Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
• Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun…
• She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her…
• Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
• She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her…
• Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
• When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have…
• What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
• Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Browse Milan Kundera Quotes by Category