Top Milan Kundera Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Milan Kundera Biography

Milan Kundera (Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]; born 1 April 1929) is a Czech-born French writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores".

Read about Milan Kundera in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Milan Kundera Quotes

Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.

Inconvenience, Jealousy, Pleasant, Quality, Touching

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Begins, Character, Courage, Discovery, Fond, Secret

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

Children, Kitsch, Nice, Running, Tear

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. . . The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Begin, Book, Memories, Memory, Nation, Struggle

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I. . . " seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

Bondage, Echoes, Men, Nothing, Reality, Seize

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Bird, Chance, Down, Francis, Love Is, Magic

In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.

Dance, Eroticism, Leading, Partners

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

Leave, Life Is, Lives, Longs, Unbearable, Unhappy Person

The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

Important, Maintain, See, Thing, Three, Years

Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.

Disgusting, Having, Oneself, Talent, Talk

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Everything, Free, Giving, Loses, Men, Monsters

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically. )

Emotional, Love Is, Men, Period, Physiological, Required

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

Rain, Fall, Self, Carrying, Ones, Warm

But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?

Gone, Man, Master, Masters, Men

The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Age, Arrived, Disappearing, Morning, Wakes, Want

it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. . . but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

Coincidence, Dimension, Fascinated, Men, Mysterious

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.

False, Lying, Memories, Taken, Things, Vengeance

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

Eternal, Man, Men, Parody

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Timorously, Together, Too Late, Used, Vocabularies, Vocabulary

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Kitsch, Matter, Human Condition, Integral, Human, Condition

...

17