Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

  Milan Kundera

  Knowing, Giving, Emotion

  22 Copy quote

• To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Able, Accepting

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Country, Mean, Childhood

  5 Copy quote

• Happiness is the longing for repetition.

  Milan Kundera

  Happiness, Laughter, Joy

  31 Copy quote

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

  Milan Kundera

  Intelligent, Finding Yourself, Born

  "Farewell Waltz: A Novel". Book by Milan Kundera, 1976.

  28 Copy quote

• The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  Milan Kundera

  Strength, Memories, Struggle

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 2 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

  30 Copy quote

• A man is responsible for his ignorance.

  Milan Kundera

  Ignorance, Men, Responsible

  13 Copy quote

• Optimism is the opium of the people.

  Milan Kundera

  Optimistic, Optimism, People

  Milan Kundera (1983). “The Joke”, Viking Press

  27 Copy quote

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

  Milan Kundera

  Unhappy Person, Unbearable, Life Is

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

  22 Copy quote

• The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

  Milan Kundera

  Pleasure, Ambiguity, Greater

  12 Copy quote

• At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Ends, True Love Is

  9 Copy quote

• A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Thinking, Able

  19 Copy quote

• It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

  Milan Kundera

  Lying, Secret, Borders

  24 Copy quote

• I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.

  Milan Kundera

  Thinking, Mind, World

  "Farewell Waltz". Book by Milan Kundera, 1972.

  75 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Dream, Communication, Games

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

  83 Copy quote

• There is no perfection only life

  Milan Kundera

  Perfection

  10 Copy quote

• To laugh is to live profoundly.

  Milan Kundera

  Laughing, Chaos

  35 Copy quote

• We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

  Milan Kundera

  Eye, Past, Glances

  63 Copy quote

• Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

  Milan Kundera

  Decision, Granted, Reason

  14 Copy quote

• Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Hatred, Certain

  40 Copy quote

• We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

  Milan Kundera

  Eye, People, Dreamer

  31 Copy quote

• Sad company is bad company.

  Milan Kundera

  Bad Company, Company

  "The Farewell Waltz". Book by Milan Kundera, 1972.

  11 Copy quote

• All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Shadow, Empires

  13 Copy quote

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

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Definitions, Definition Of Love

  12 Copy quote

• Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Lying, Believe

  8 Copy quote

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