Milan Kundera Quotes

Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.

The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.

Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

... 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 that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?

Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

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

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

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

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.

All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Speak truth to power.

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

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.

The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.

[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.

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day.

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.

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.

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

Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.