1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera photo

Milan Kundera Quotes

Total quotes: 23
“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Alone, Isolation, beauty, Beautiful, Relationships, one perfect sentence, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
— Milan Kundera, Identity: A Novel
Tagged: Relationship, couple, Lovers, Love, affection, Words, Feelings, romance
“The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
Tagged: Return, Suffering, Nostalgia
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: strength, Weak, Leaving, Letting Go
“I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind… 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, The Farewell Party
Tagged: Freedom, Friendship
“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?”
— Milan Kundera, Identify
Tagged: Irony, Nostalgia, Absence, Sadness
“The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.”
— Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves
Tagged: Being human, humanity, risking, Taking Risks, offering, sacrificing, Helping, human actions, Human Behavior, Human Beauty, human, human's worth
“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.”
— Milan Kundera, P.S. Grandma Says
Tagged: Dogs, Jealousy, Peace
“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.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tagged: Empaths, Emotion, Beautiful, Feeling, Sensitivity, Compassion, gentle, Loving, heart, Being, Pain
“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.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Compassion, Pain, Suffering
“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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tagged: Books, novel, Literature, Love
“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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Dating, romance, inspiration, Sex, reevaluate
“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.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Memory, Psychology, Remembering, Nostalgia
“As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tagged: Litost, Czech Words, Untranslatable Words, humanity, Words, Language, Understanding Language, Pain, Aching
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Love, romance, heart, Mind, Heart And Mind
“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 Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Future, Past, History, Destruction, Interest, humanity
“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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Fear, falling, higher, Desire, self, Emptiness, Life
“I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Weakness, strength, Relationships, Desire
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Longing, Loss
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Read In Your 20s
“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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Tagged: Sex, Making Love, Passion
“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 first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need.

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers.”
— Milan Kundera, via Amazon
Tagged: People, judging eyes, perceived by others, Judged, Human Relationships
“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? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life!

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love. 

 And he was distressed that in a situation where a real man would instantly have known how to act, he was vacillating and therefore depriving the most beautiful moments he had ever experienced (kneeling at her bed and thinking he would not survive her death) of their meaning.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tagged: Hysteria, Fanatic, Distress, Love, Confusion, Hesitance
loading next page...