Milan Kundera Quotes

How goodness heightens beauty!

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing w...

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupat...

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times...

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of th...

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagina...

There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certai...

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of...

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear...

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals we...

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus ...

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional ...

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his ...

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most nai...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situ...

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independen...

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the in...

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon ag...

metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to l...

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has...

Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is t...

she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways i...

Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of u...

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and ...

In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with...

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different b...

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly reve...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situ...

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dan...

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anywa...

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as we...

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she...

Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's...

Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagin...

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his ...

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records ever...

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves not others, was possible only away from the ...

Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessa...

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers...

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done...

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteri...

They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly ha...

A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear—instead of b...

Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temp...

whether they knew of didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent ...

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) Th...

Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength...

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all...

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her wo...

The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at ...

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unim...

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do no...

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain on...

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is ...

He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!

People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.

She spoke about it with such emphasis (somewhat affected) that I could see at once that I was hearin...

Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing spe...

How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I ...

Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (...

I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me...

Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people...

Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when ...

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing spee...

Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfor...

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of...

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was ...

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.At meetings I was earnest, enthusi...

We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, n...

People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing...

And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain ...

The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?

For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that inelu...

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on th...

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is ...

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from t...

Encouraged by her parents’ applause, the girl went on: “Do you think we take off our tops to give yo...

During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simp...

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an a...

Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being alway...

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men ...

Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at...

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes fr...

Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll hav...

...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the...

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hi...