Milan Kundera Quotes

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

Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.

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.

I looked at her; I saw a slipshod permanet crumpling her hair into a shapeless mass of curls; I saw a brown overcoat, pitifully threadbare and a bit too shot; I saw a face both unobtrusively attractive and attractively unobtrusive; I sensed in this young woman tranquillity, simplicity and modesty, and I felt that these were qualities I needed; moreover, it seemed to me that we were very much akin: all I had to do was to go up and start talking to her and she would smile as if a long-lost brother had suddenly appeared before her.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

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

The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.

Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.

If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister…

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.

The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around

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 his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

الصمت يجذب الانتباه. وقد يكون مثيراً. يجعلك غامضاً أو مشبوهاً.

It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.

لا أفهم كيف يمكن للمرء أن يتحدث عن الحرية دون أن يُلقي بهذا العبء عن كاهله. مثل شجرة موجودة في موطنها الذي لا تستطيع أن تنمو فيه، تكون الشجرة في موطنها حيث تجد الأرض الخصبة.

أترين يا كلارا ؟ أنتى تظنين أن الكذبة تعادل الأخـرى، لكنك مخطأة. أستطيع أن أختلق أى شئ، وأن أضحك على ذقون الناس وأخدعهم، وأن أقوم بكل أنواع التدليس من دون أن أشعر بأنى كاذب. فهذه الأنواع من الكذب، إن شئتى أن تسمى هذا كذبًا، هى أنا، أنا على حقيقتى. فبهذه الأنواع من الكذب لا أخفى شيئًا، بل أعبر عن الحقيقة. لكن هناك أشياء لا أستطيع الكذب فيها. هناك أشياء خبرتها جيدًا، أعرف معناها وأحبها، وهى أشياء لا أتساهل فيها. الكذب فيها حطّ من قدرى، وهو أمر لا أطيقه، فلا تطالبينى بيه، لأننى لن أفعله.

To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

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.

"What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."