Milan Kundera Quotes

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.

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

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

And I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but at least was asbolutely serious about marrying her one day

تختفي الذكريات إذا لم تُستحضر مرة وأخرى في أحاديث الأصدقاء.

Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

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

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).

Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female in the world.

Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

صدای پاشنه های کفشتان در پیاده رو مرا به فکر راه هایی که نپیموده ام، راه هایی که به سان ِ شاخه های درخت پر از رشته های فرعی اند، می اندازد. شما در من وسوسه های دوران نوجوانی ام را بیدار کرده اید. من زندگی را در برابرم همچون درختی تصور می کردم. در آن هنگام آن را درخت امکانات می نامیدم. تنها در لحظه های کوتاه زندگی را این چنین می بینیم. سپس زندگی همچون راهی نمایان می شود که یک بار برای همیشه تحمیل شده است. همچون تونلی که از آن نمی توان بیرون رفت. با این همه جلوه ی درخت در ذهن ما همچون حسرت گذشته محو ناشدنی باقی می ماند...