75 Top Quotes By Milan Kundera, The Author Of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Milan Kundera is a French author, novelist, essayist, playwright and short story writer, who was born in Czechoslovakia but has been living in exile in France since 1975 and is often regarded as one of the greatest authors of the modern era. Kundera’s staggering body of work is frequently cited as being worthy of a Nobel Prize in Literature and most of his books have been read by people from all across the world. His first book titled ‘The Joke’ was published in 1967 but the criticism of the Soviet Union did not go down well with the ruling class in Czechoslovakia. ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ was published after he moved to France and remains one of his notable works. However, his most famous work remains the 1984 novel ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, which was later on turned into a film by Philip Kaufman. Other notable works include ‘Immortality; Life is Elsewhere’, ‘Identity’, ‘Slowness’, ‘Ignorance’ and ‘The Festival of Insignificance’ among others. He has also won plenty of awards including Jerusalem Prize, Herder Prize and The Austrian State Prize for European Literature among others. Kundera is one of the intellectual giants of the modern era and as such has delivered plenty of quotable quotes through his work and life. Here are the selected ones.
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
For 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.
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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.
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
There is no perfection only life
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.
A single metaphor can give birth to love.
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
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.
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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.
Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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.
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.
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
To laugh is to live profoundly.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
