Milan Kundera Quotes
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
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 of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
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 can seize.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
...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 with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
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 resee a film.
Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
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 to change.
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
