1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

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.

To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.

The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

Is it right to raise one’s voice when others are being silenced? Yes.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.

Unintentional beauty. Another way of putting it might be ‘beauty by mistake’. Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. Beauty by mistake – the final phase in the history of beauty.

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.