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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

When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Immortality (1988)

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Immortality (1988)

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

Immortality (1988)

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought.

Immortality (1988)

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

Identity (1998)

The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.

Identity (1998)

You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.

Identity (1998)

Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.

Identity (1998)

He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Reality does not discuss, it simply is.

Attribution

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