1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.

I’d never recited poetry to anyone before; I’ve never done it since. I have a highly sensitive, built-in fuse mechanism that keeps me from opening up too far, from revealing my feelings, and reciting poetry makes me feel as though I’m talking about my feelings and standing on one leg at the same time.

But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?

Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child.

Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what’s most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, it maladies, its manias.

Elisabeth, can’t you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn’t go to bed with him?

To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one’s own seriousness.