1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening".

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!