Milan Kundera Quotes

There is nothing harder to explain than humor.

The man raised his glass, 'To you!'Can't you think of a wittier t

Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!

It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.

Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.

She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.

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.

The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.

Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Everyone is wrong about the future.

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

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

What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.

There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.

The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories.

she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.

[mother] belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away.

Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.

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

Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.

Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand

The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.

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

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.

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

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

Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.

Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.

Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .

The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.

Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing.

In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.

Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.