Milan Kundera Quotes

Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of mans 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.

The male glance has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her — in other words, turning her into an object.

What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely defenseless against that glance. If it turns her into an object, then she looks back at the man with the eyes of an object. It is though a hammer had suddenly grown eyes and stare up at the worker pounding a nail with it. When the worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses his self-assurance and slams it on his thumb.

The worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

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

It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair.

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

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.

In this country people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure. Believe me, it is the mornings that determine a man's character.

What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

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.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known since childhood.

Mientras que las personas son jóvenes y la composición musical de su vida está aún en los primeros compases, pueden escribirla juntas e intercambiarse motivos, pero cuando se encuentran y ya son mayores, sus composiciones musicales están más o menos cerradas y cada palabra, cada objeto significa una cosa distinta en la composición de la una y en la de la otra

أن تشعـر بالذنب أو تُشعـَرَ به. أعتقد أن كل شئ يكمن هنا. فالحياة هى صراع الجميع ضد الجميع. هذا معروف، لكن كيف يتجلى هذا الصراع فى مجتمع متمدن إلى هذا الحد ؟ لا يمكن للناس أن يهاجموا بعضهم بعضًا عندما يلتقون. يحاولون بدلًا من ذلك أن يلقوا على الآخرين عار الشعور بالذنب. وسيفـوز من ينجح فى جعل الآخـر مذنبًا. وسيخسر من يعترف بخطئه.

No matter what people say, life is marvelous, if you want to know who gets mu goats, it's those killjoy pessimists, even if I have plenty to complain about, you don't hear a peep out of me, what for. I ask you, what for, when life can bring me a day like today; oh, how marvelous it all is: a strange town, and me here with you...

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.

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.