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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 12

All Quotes Adventure Age Ambition Art Attitude Beauty Betrayal Brotherhood Certainty Character Childhood Children Choices Coincidence Compassion Culture Darkness Desire Doubt Drama Evil Fashion Feelings Film Funny Giving Goodness Happiness Hatred Heart Home Hurt Imagination Immortality Inspirational Joy Judgment Laughter Life Love Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Morning Nostalgia Passion Past Pleasure Reality Running Sadness Sleep Soul Struggle Stupidity Suffering Today Understanding Violence War Water Writing

I find myself fascinating.

I find myself fascinating.

Self, Fascinating

Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.

Player, Games, Traps

Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.

Men, People, Fellow Man

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.

Morality, Judgment, Novel

"Testaments Betrayed". Book by Milan Kundera, 1995.

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

Real, Hypocrite, Faces

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

Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

Past, Different, Looks

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

Thinking, Ideas, Mad

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!

Running, Children, Nice

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

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

Memories, Flower, Past

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Ideas, Hammers, Tools

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Discovery, Criticism, Critics

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.

Running, Men, Thinking

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

Men, Age, Body

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1984.

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

Differences, Doe, Stones

And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.

Fall, Heart, Sight

what's the matter?" he asked "nothing" "what do you want me to do for you?" "i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older" what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.

Years, Twenties, Want

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

Funny, Humorous, Inspiration

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

Jobs, Epic, Men

Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

Mean, Use, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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

The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.

Eye, Identity, Persons

"Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?

Mean, Want, Revolution

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

Passion, Men, Tests

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

Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.

Europe, Important, Toil

She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say. The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.

Strong, Overwhelming Desire, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Understanding, Age, Too Late

"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". Book by Milan Kundera, 1979.

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