Milan Kundera Quotes
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.
Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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.
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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 self-confidence.
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.
The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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 empty: the view has changed.
Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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 foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.