Milan Kundera Quotes
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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.
The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.
My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
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.
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.
Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
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.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
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.
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
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.
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
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.
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.
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.
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.
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.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.