110+ Milan Kundera Quotes On Death, Politics And Dogs

Milan Kundera was a Czechoslovakian writer and playwright. He is best known for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was made into a film in 1988. His works often focus on the complexities of human existence, blending humor, irony, and philosophical inquiry. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Milan Kundera on love, death, politics.

Top 10 Milan Kundera Quotes

1. The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
2. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
3. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
4. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
5. The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
6. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
7. In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
8. I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.
9. The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
10. Oh 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 Short Quotes

• You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
• Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
• The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
• Happiness is the longing for repetition.
• In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
• Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
• Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
• The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
• The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
• On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Milan Kundera Quotes About Love

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). — Milan Kundera

she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others. — Milan Kundera

loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away. — Milan Kundera

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together. — Milan Kundera

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. — Milan Kundera

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful. — Milan Kundera

Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible. — Milan Kundera

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. — Milan Kundera

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all. — Milan Kundera

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About Death

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. — Milan Kundera

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. — Milan Kundera

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death. — Milan Kundera

The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins. — Milan Kundera

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death. — Milan Kundera

Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything. — Milan Kundera

Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her. — Milan Kundera

At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love. — Milan Kundera

Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love. — Milan Kundera

To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in. — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About Dogs

Dogs are our link to paradise. — Milan Kundera

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. — Milan Kundera

given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love. — Milan Kundera

God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads. — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About People

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. — Milan Kundera

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end. — Milan Kundera

Optimism is the opium of the people. — Milan Kundera

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still. — Milan Kundera

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. — Milan Kundera

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. — Milan Kundera

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. — Milan Kundera

...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. — Milan Kundera

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. — Milan Kundera

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About Life

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. — Milan Kundera

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? — Milan Kundera

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

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake. — Milan Kundera

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously. — Milan Kundera

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. — Milan Kundera

Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148) — Milan Kundera

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. — Milan Kundera

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? — Milan Kundera

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. — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About True

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

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. — Milan Kundera

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. — Milan Kundera

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company. — 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

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes! — Milan Kundera

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About Existence

The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia. — Milan Kundera

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. — Milan Kundera

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. — 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

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? — Milan Kundera

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. — 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

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability. — Milan Kundera

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence. — Milan Kundera

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes About Novels

[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. — Milan Kundera

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. — Milan Kundera

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? — 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

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. — Milan Kundera

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised 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. — Milan Kundera

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped? — Milan Kundera

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses. — Milan Kundera

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

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero? — Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Milan Kundera

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. — Milan Kundera

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. — 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

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you. — Milan Kundera

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch. — Milan Kundera

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more. — Milan Kundera

It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. — Milan Kundera

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. — Milan Kundera

Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound. — Milan Kundera

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death. — 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

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time. — Milan Kundera

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries. — Milan Kundera

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting. — Milan Kundera

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. — Milan Kundera

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. — Milan Kundera

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. — Milan Kundera

Speak truth to power. — Milan Kundera

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. — Milan Kundera

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. — 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

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. — Milan Kundera

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. — Milan Kundera

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

The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas. — Milan Kundera

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. — Milan Kundera

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise. — Milan Kundera

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue. — 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

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure. — Milan Kundera

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. — Milan Kundera

My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. — Milan Kundera

Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes! — Milan Kundera

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave. — Milan Kundera

A man is responsible for his ignorance. — Milan Kundera

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. — Milan Kundera

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest. — Milan Kundera

Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love. — 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

Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. — Milan Kundera

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. — Milan Kundera

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice. — Milan Kundera

we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. — Milan Kundera

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means. — Milan Kundera

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. — Milan Kundera

Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it. — Milan Kundera

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. — Milan Kundera

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. — Milan Kundera

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

...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener) — Milan Kundera

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind. — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor — Milan Kundera

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values. — Milan Kundera

Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray? — 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

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion. — Milan Kundera

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

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. — Milan Kundera

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. — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. — Milan Kundera

Life Lessons by Milan Kundera

1. Milan Kundera teaches us to appreciate the beauty of life, the importance of living in the present moment, and the power of human relationships.
2. He encourages us to be aware of the fragility of life and to savor the moments of joy that we experience.
3. He reminds us to be mindful of our actions and to strive to make the world a better place by being kind and compassionate to others.