1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

We won’t understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.

That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us.

Alas, I found no guarantee I would have acted any better; but how has that affected my relationship with others? The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.

A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions.

In death, Franz at last belonged to his wife. He belonged to her as he had never belonged to her before. Marie-Claude took care of everything: she saw to the funeral, sent out announcements, bought the wreaths, and had a black dress made – a wedding dress, in reality. Yes, a husband’s funeral is a wife’s true wedding! The climax of her life’s work! The reward of her sufferings!

Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life – these were the gifts she had left him.

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.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?