The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models – those that are in fashion, that suit, that please – and enact them.

— Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Quotes

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

Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we’ve stopped seeing it and hearing it.

— Milan Kundera

That’s the age people marry, have their first child, choose a profession. Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it’s too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn’t know a thing.

— Milan Kundera

The fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

— Milan Kundera

Anyone who decides to leave his country forever has to resign himself never to see his family again.

— Milan Kundera

You’ll learn either that people aren’t human or that you don’t know what humans are like.

— Milan Kundera

It was twilight in the garden, the time between day and evening. There was a pale moon in the sky, a forgotten lamp in the room of the dead.

— Milan Kundera

It is completely selfless love: Tereza didn’t want anything; She didn’t ever ask him to love her back. Nor has she ever asked herself questions like: does he love me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. The reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved.

— Milan Kundera
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