Quotes by
Milan Kundera |
1929-2023 , Czech writer
Czech writer with French citizenship. He was born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, former Czechoslovakia and has lived in France since 1975.He became particularly known for his works The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke.
| 34 quotes | 959 visits |
Quotations
| • | Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful. 2 |
| • | Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all. 2 |
| • | Memory does not make films, it makes photographs. 2 |
| • | But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave. 1 |
| • | Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 1 |
| • | The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. 1 |
| • | Animals were never kicked out of Heaven… 1 |
| • | 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. |
| • | When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. |
| • | All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. |
| • | No love can survive muteness. |
| • | The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man. |
| • | Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back. |
| • | Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. |
| • | There is no perfection, only life. |
| • | At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love. |
| • | A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person. |
| • | The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. |
| • | Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. |
| • | Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile. |
| • | On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth. |
| • | The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries. |
| • | There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos. |
| • | In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. |
| • | Optimism is the opium of the people. |
| • | Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable |
| • | The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. |
| • | The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. |
| • | No action is good or bad in itself. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad. |
| • | Great novels are always a little smarter than their authors. |
| • | The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated. |
| • | To be a writer is not to preach a truth, it is to discover a truth. |
| • | A novel is a meditation on existence seen through imaginary persons. |
| • | The dream is the proof that to imagine, to dream of what has not existed, is one of the deepest needs of man. |
