Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• [W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
• The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
• While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together…
• The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
• Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder…
• Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you.…
• She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
• Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.
• Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.
• given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at…
• Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
• Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less…
• ...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact…
• I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
• Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to…
• When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is…
• The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
• It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which…
• Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
• Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more…

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