Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
• The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm…
• Pick me up," is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.
• Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste…
• We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live…
• We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice…
• For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
• I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I…
• I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself
• and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and…
• To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far…
• She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We…
• Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a…
• Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
• Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear…
• A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself,…
• In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
• What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what…
• When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is…
• A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

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