1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

Y así es como funciona el mundo que nos rodea. Si insistiese en decirle la verdad a la cara, eso significaría que me lo tomo en serio. Y tomarse en serio algo tan poco serio significa perder la seriedad. Yo, hermano, tengo que mentir si no quiero tomarme en serio a los locos y convertirme yo mismo en uno de los locos.

To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

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? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue "something higher"- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books.

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence

It's a great consolation to think that when we've long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth.