Milan Kundera quotes

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks. (Milan Kundera)
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
Milan Kundera
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
Milan Kundera
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Milan Kundera
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
Milan Kundera
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
Milan Kundera
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Milan Kundera
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Milan Kundera
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. (Milan Kundera)
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Milan Kundera
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Milan Kundera
Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.
Milan Kundera
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
Milan Kundera
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
Milan Kundera
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. (Milan Kundera)
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Milan Kundera
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
Milan Kundera
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Milan Kundera
How goodness heightens beauty!
Milan Kundera