Milan Kundera Quotes

Sometimes (more in sport than from real concern) I defended myself against the charge of individualism and demanded from the others proof that I was an individualist. For want of concrete evidence they would say: “ It´s the way you behave.” “How do I behave?” “You have a strange kind of smile”. “And If I do? That´s how I express my joy.”
“No, your smile is though you were thinking to yourself.

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.

...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.

Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.

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

People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability of suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror, and nothing but horror.

لا شىء يُقارب بين الناس بهذه السرعة مثل اتفاق حزين ، كئيب . هذا الجو من التواطؤ المسالم الذي ينيّم أي نوع من المخاوف أو المكابح وتفهمه النفوس المُهذبة كالنفوس العامية ؛ يمثل أسهل نمط للتقارب !.

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages ts guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.

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.

To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Hacer el amor con una mujer y dormir con una mujer son dos pasiones no sólo distintas sino casi contradictorias. El amor no se manifiesta en el deseo de acostarse con alguien (este deseo se produce en relación con una cantidad innumerable de mujeres), sino en el deseo de dormir junto a alguien (este deseo se produce en relación con una única mujer).

Yes, it's crazy.Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

Indeed, the only truely serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truely serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set limits, describes the boundaries of human exsistence.