We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Life and Living
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
—Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side… nudity is a shroud.
—Milan Kundera
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Goodness
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
Topics: Books
Optimism is the opium of the people.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Optimism
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Happiness
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Anxiety
O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Betrayal
The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
—Milan Kundera
Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Animals
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Memory
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Kindness, Compassion
Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Business
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Laughter
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Books, Literature
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Solitude
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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
Topics: Activism
The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Change
A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Tourism, Travel
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Individuality
Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man’s image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Women
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they’re all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Culture
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
—Milan Kundera
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Criticism, Critics
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Stress
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
—Milan Kundera
Topics: Faces, Face
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Blaise Cendrars Swiss Poet, Writer
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Jules Verne French Novelist
- Henri de Montherlant French Essayist, Novelist, Dramatist
- Alfred de Musset French Poet, Playwright
- Andre Maurois French Novelist, Biographer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Jonathan Lethem American Novelist, Essayist
- Jean Giraudoux French Novelist, Playwright
- Emile Zola French Novelist
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