Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and…
• This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past,…
• Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world…
• Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events;…
• No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner…
• The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the…
• Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
• Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence
• I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
• If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of…
• The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question,
• There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel…
• The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.…
• A constant interrogation.
• In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
• The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.
• The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
• Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
• Dogs are our link to paradise.
• Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge…

Browse Milan Kundera Quotes by Category