1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.

He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned never to say another sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse with that orgiastic thunder of music. And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell asleep.

He felt responsible for his fate, but his fate felt no responsibility for him.

He had come to find out once and for all that neither parades nor Sabina but rather the girl with the glasses was his real life, his only real life! He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions – love, antipathy, charity, or malice – and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemeteries... When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure... To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we’d rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn’t know how to deal with women.

We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.