Top 100 Milan Kundera Quotes From The Author Of 'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being'

Milan Kundera is a Czech-born French writer whose works have been celebrated all over the world.

Born in formerly Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera has been living in France since 1975. Best known amongst his fans for the book 'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being', the writer has been a recipient of numerous prizes and accolades.

Let's take a look at these Milan Kundera quotes that include Milan Kundera motorcycle quotes, Milan Kundera love quotes, lack of affection quotes, and quotes about being an author. If you like these Milan Kundera quotes, check out Kafka quotes and Jean-Paul Sartre quotes.

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Inspiring Milan Kundera Quotes

Here are some inspirational Milan Kundera quotes.

1. "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."

- Milan Kundera.

2. "All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it."

- Milan Kundera.

3. "The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

5. "Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it."

- Milan Kundera.

6. "We must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

12. "Optimism is the opium of the people."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

14. "To laugh is to live profoundly."

- Milan Kundera.

15. "Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches."

- Milan Kundera.

16. "Dogs are our link to paradise."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

18. "Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile."

- Milan Kundera.

19. "Doesn't the art of the novel, with its feel for the relativity of human truths, require that the author's opinion stay out of sight and that all thinking be left to the reader alone?"

- Milan Kundera.

20. "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything."

- Milan Kundera.

Best Milan Kundera Quotes

Take a look at the best of Milan Kundera quotes.

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

- Milan Kundera.

22. "...a man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms)."

- Milan Kundera.

23. "What was the magic in the appeal to patriotism? Was it the charm of a journey into the unknown?"

- Milan Kundera.

24. "Memory does not make films, it makes photographs."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

26. "Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."

- Milan Kundera.

27. "No love can survive muteness."

- Milan Kundera.

28. "Beauty is a rebellion against time."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

30. "To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden..."

- Milan Kundera.

31. "Now, are great dramatic actions really the best clue to understanding human nature?"

- Milan Kundera.

32. "[Carpentier] he is not asking 'Why do we have to disappear?' but 'Why did we have to be born?'"

- Milan Kundera.

33. "A unique situation: the Czechs, all of them bilingual, then had the chance to choose: to be born or not be born; to be or not to be."

- Milan Kundera.

34. "This character so unbelievably, implausibly good and yet so real, he is surely more worthy of compassion than the 'diligent benefactress' in the provinces who so touched Sainte-Beuve."

- Milan Kundera.

35. "The era of descriptions began. (Description: compassion for the ephemeral; salvaging the perishable.)"

- Milan Kundera.

'Slowness' Milan Kundera Quotes

Scroll down for some great Milan Kundera quotes from his novel 'Slowness'.

36. "Epicurus, the first great theoretician of pleasure, had a highly skeptical understanding of the happy life: pleasure is the absence of suffering."

- Milan Kundera.

37. "We are all dancers, as you say. I would even say: either we’re dancers or we’re deserters."

- Milan Kundera.

38. "The conversation starts up again, and again they move off from the chateau, along a path that, this time, will lead them unobstructed to the clasp of love."

- Milan Kundera.

39. "When someone seeks to confirm his elect status by a direct, personal contact with someone famous, he runs the risk of being thrown out, like the woman who loved Kissinger."

- Milan Kundera.

40. "Like parodies of themselves, theological notions are reflected in the triviality of our lives..."

- Milan Kundera.

41. "...he considered the proposal to do a film on him an excellent thing because he had always hoped to transform his life into a work of art."

- Milan Kundera.

42. "The term 'dancer' applies exclusively to exhibitionists in public life. And I abhor public life."

- Milan Kundera.

43. "He is in love with his life the way a sculptor might be in love with the statue he is carving."

- Milan Kundera.

44. "And we, all of us, live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from now on."

- Milan Kundera.

45. "...what first appears to be a merrily obscene game shifts imperceptibly and ineluctably into a life-and-death struggle."

- Milan Kundera.

Great Milan Kundera 'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being' Quotes

These are some wonderful Kundera quotes from his most celebrated book.

46. "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."

- Milan Kundera.

47. "A man of about sixty was playing the piano, a woman of the same age the violin. The hits they played were forty years old."

- Milan Kundera.

48. "True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power."

- Milan Kundera.

49. "Though annoyed at his carelessness, she stroked his forehead, which was beaded with sweat from the pain."

- Milan Kundera.

50. "He understood he was not born to live side by side with any woman and could be fully himself only as a bachelor."

- Milan Kundera.

51. "Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No..."

- Milan Kundera.

52. "In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."

- Milan Kundera

53. "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."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

57. "But you don't want people to think that you, a doctor, wanted to deprive human beings of their right to see!"

- Milan Kundera.

58. "The old man died, and Sabina moved to California. Farther west, farther away from the country where she had been born."

- Milan Kundera.

59. "Kitsch is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German, it entered all Western languages."

- Milan Kundera.

60. "People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another."

- Milan Kundera.

61. "Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death."

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

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

- Milan Kundera.

64. "...there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

- Milan Kundera.

65. "Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

- Milan Kundera.

Milan Kundera 'The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting' Quotes

Take a look at these amazing Milan Kundera quotes from this novel from 1979. You may just find your favorite quote on forgetting here.

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

- Milan Kundera.

67. "But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity."

- Milan Kundera.

68. "A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight."

- Milan Kundera.

69. "I am always unsure of myself when it comes time for me to enter that vast crowd of John the Baptists."

- Milan Kundera.

70. "...all Tamina will have left is the present, that invisible point, that nothing moving slowly toward death."

- Milan Kundera.

71. "She was the only person her dead husband had in the world, the only one!"

- Milan Kundera.

72. "We must be careful not to replace one type of power with another."

- Milan Kundera.

73. "No work of Beethoven’s has ever elicited greater collective passion than the constant repetitive throb of the guitar."

- Milan Kundera.

74. "A poet has got to have his pride. Without it, he would betray his life’s work."

- Milan Kundera.

75. "...we must reject the very principle of power and reject it everywhere."

- Milan Kundera.

76. "She cannot look at a man any other way. It takes a good deal of effort, she needs to mobilize all her imagination..."

- Milan Kundera.

77. "The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her."

- Milan Kundera.

78. "Banaka is so much the victim of his own reputation that, believe me, he himself has nothing but scorn for people who read his books."

- Milan Kundera.

79. "All man’s life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others."

- Milan Kundera.

80. "The first time an angel heard the Devil’s laughter, he was horrified."

- Milan Kundera.

Milan Kundera 'Immortality' Quotes

Read some of these beautiful Milan Kundera quotes from his work 'Immortality'.

81. "Even though she had no drawing skill, she set to work that very night and produced her own sketch for the sculpture."

- Milan Kundera.

82. "Servants are also human beings, and you mustn't drive them like machines!"

- Milan Kundera.

83. "It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will."

- Milan Kundera.

84. "He has no other choice but to destroy his weakness along with his own self. And so the girl's dream of her own death was born."

- Milan Kundera.

85. "...would all these great talents step aside, retreat, so to speak, to the cloister of history, full of cosmic disappointment that they had been born at the wrong time, outside their own era, outside the dial, the time they'd been created for?"

- Milan Kundera.

86. "I had finished the novel and I wanted to celebrate it in the place where the first idea for it was born."

- Milan Kundera.

87. "One day, she actually said it outright: she wanted to write a book based on his mother's recollections."

- Milan Kundera.

88. "Yes, of course. One starts thinking about immortality in childhood."

- Milan Kundera.

89. "Is it possible to push a child off one's lap?"

- Milan Kundera.

90. "Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born."

- Milan Kundera.

Milan Kundera 'The Festival Of Insignificance' Quotes

Here are some quotes from Kundera's lastest novel.

91. "In my unbeliever's dictionary, only one word is sacred: 'friendship.'"

- Milan Kundera.

92. "We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously."

- Milan Kundera.

93. "The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?"

- Milan Kundera.

94. "It often takes courage to acknowledge it [insignificance] in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name."

- Milan Kundera.

95. "Even the dialogue between two lovers, if their birth dates are too far apart, is only the intertwining of two monologues, each holding for the other much that is not understood."

- Milan Kundera.

96. "Only from the heights of an infinite good mood can you observe below you the eternal stupidity of men, and laugh over it."

- Milan Kundera.

97. "It struck him that the angel he had thought about these past weeks was alerting him that it was already somewhere here, very nearby."

- Milan Kundera.

98. "I think our jokes have lost their power... All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.”

- Milan Kundera.

99. "Of course, uniformity rules everywhere."

- Milan Kundera.

100. "Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence."

- Milan Kundera.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Milan Kundera quotes, then why not take a look at 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' quotes, or Kant quotes.