Milan Kundera is a French author, novelist, essayist, playwright and short story writer, who was born in Czechoslovakia but has been living in exile in France since 1975 and is often regarded as one of the greatest authors of the modern era. Kundera’s staggering body of work is frequently cited as being worthy of a Nobel Prize in Literature and most of his books have been read by people from all across the world. His first book titled ‘The Joke’ was published in 1967 but the criticism of the Soviet Union did not go down well with the ruling class in Czechoslovakia. ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ was published after he moved to France and remains one of his notable works. However, his most famous work remains the 1984 novel ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, which was later on turned into a film by Philip Kaufman. Other notable works include ‘Immortality; Life is Elsewhere’, ‘Identity’, ‘Slowness’, ‘Ignorance’ and ‘The Festival of Insignificance’ among others. He has also won plenty of awards including Jerusalem Prize, Herder Prize and The Austrian State Prize for European Literature among others. Kundera is one of the intellectual giants of the modern era and as such has delivered plenty of quotable quotes through his work and life. Here are the selected ones.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
Milan Kundera
For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Milan Kundera
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Milan Kundera
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Milan Kundera
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
Milan Kundera
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
Milan Kundera
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
Milan Kundera
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
A man is responsible for his ignorance.
Milan Kundera
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.
Milan Kundera
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
Milan Kundera
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…
Milan Kundera
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
Milan Kundera
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
Milan Kundera
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Milan Kundera
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
, apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it. )
, we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. )
