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Milan Kundera Quotes

1929–2023 Czech Republic

Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).

Czech Republic
Novelists
Playwrights
Poets

Also known as: Kundera, Milan

Random Milan Kundera quote

90 quotes

We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Optimism is the opium of the people.

The Joke (1967)

They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)

Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Nadine Gordimer interview (2004)

The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

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

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

The Joke (1967)

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

The Joke (1967)

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

Immortality (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Milan Kundera (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.