Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

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

  Milan Kundera

  Happiness, Laughter, Joy

  18 Copy quote

• Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

  Milan Kundera

  Sweet, Loneliness, Being Alone

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• Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, People, Imagination

  "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book edited by George Plimpton, October 1, 1986.

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Men, Knowing

  9 Copy quote

• Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable

  Milan Kundera

  Pain, Reason, Reasonable

  4 Copy quote

• I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.

  Milan Kundera

  Self, Feelings, Suffering

  9 Copy quote

• The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Men, Emotional

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Beautiful, Mistake, Men

  14 Copy quote

• We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

  Milan Kundera

  Actors, Warning, Rehearsal

  9 Copy quote

• No love can survive muteness.

  Milan Kundera

  No Love

  "Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

  6 Copy quote

• What I need most of all is certainty.

  Milan Kundera

  Needs, Certainty

  4 Copy quote

• The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Degrees, Forget

  14 Copy quote

• How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.

  Milan Kundera

  Suffering, Glimpse, Nostalgia

  "Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1997.

  26 Copy quote

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

  Milan Kundera

  Home, Mind, Unbearable

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". 1988.

  27 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Successful, Boys

  16 Copy quote

• Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.

  Milan Kundera

  Dream, Needs, Imagine

  9 Copy quote

• My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.

  Milan Kundera

  Ambition, Form, Lifelong

  14 Copy quote

• The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

  Milan Kundera

  Crazy, Book, Writing

  4 Copy quote

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

  Milan Kundera

  Music, Guitar, Idiocy

  9 Copy quote

• ...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

  Milan Kundera

  Tragedy, Mazes, Shells

  9 Copy quote

• I have no mission. No one has.

  Milan Kundera

  Missions

  5 Copy quote

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

  Milan Kundera

  Ideas, Empires, Unbearable

  30 Copy quote

• The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

  Milan Kundera

  Mistake, Choices, Matter

  94 Copy quote

• Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Logic, Source

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• Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.

  Milan Kundera

  Views, Evil, Judging

  "Testaments Betrayed". Book by Milan Kundera, 1995.

  12 Copy quote

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