1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?

For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant.Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.

After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.

Una satisfacción que tiene la obligación de cubrir el puesto de otras satisfacciones se convierte rápidamente en una satisfacción demasiado cansada.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. If we cannot change the world, let's at least change our lives and live them freely.

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.

given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love.