1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

What I need most of all is certainty.

The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time..