Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or…
• The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
• ...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too…
• Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I…
• Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of…
• For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
• The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of…
• Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a…
• In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it…
• The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat…
• There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness…
• Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born.…
• I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable…
• Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
• A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture,…
• If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo,…
• The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what…
• How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is…
• Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
• Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

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