Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: ‘I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.’ Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.

— Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes

It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.

— Milan Kundera

Poetry never plays a more important role than it does during revolutionary periods; poetry gave the revolution its voice and in return the revolution liberated poetry from isolation; the poet now knows he is being heard by the people, especially young people; for youth, poetry and revolution are one and the same.

— Milan Kundera

The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.

— Milan Kundera

Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

— Milan Kundera

Because love means renouncing strength.

— Milan Kundera

Every situation is of man’s making and can only contain what man contains.

— Milan Kundera

Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven’s Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the ‘Ode to Joy’ that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.

— Milan Kundera

I know you’re quiet a workman on God’s eternal construction site and don’t like hearing about demolition, but what can I do? Myself, I’m not one of God’s bricklayers. Besides, if God’s bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we’d be able to demolish them. But instead of walls all I see is stage sets. And stage sets are made to be demolished.

— Milan Kundera

The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

— Milan Kundera

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.

— Milan Kundera

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

— Milan Kundera

The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.

— Milan Kundera

Her beauty, which struck him at the time, did not make her look younger than her age; he might sooner have said that her age made her beauty more eloquent.

— Milan Kundera

What is a novel if not a trap for catching a hero?

— Milan Kundera

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

— Milan Kundera

To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would only meet each of his long-term mistresses only at long intervals. He considered this method flawless and propagated it among his friends: “the important thing is to abide by the rules 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.

— Milan Kundera

Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?

— Milan Kundera

Porque vivir en un mundo donde no se le perdona nada a nadie, donde nadie puede redimirse, es lo mismo que vivir en el infierno.

— Milan Kundera

I used to admire believers,” Tomas continued, “I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son’s experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.

— Milan Kundera

The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from.

— Milan Kundera
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