Milan Kundera Quotations

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.

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

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

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

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

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.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.

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

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

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

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.

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

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain.

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once youve brought breakfast in bed youll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them......

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.

...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? 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?

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.

At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

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

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

There is no perfection only life

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

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

It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.

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

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

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

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. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

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.

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.

This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten.

His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. 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.

To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.

Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: "Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.

From the top of the staircase she sees the London train, modern and elegant, and she tells herself again: Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am moving at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.

I have a strong will to love you for eternity.

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)

...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.