Quotes from Milan Kundera

But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

She knew she was being unfair...; she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.

No matter what people say, life is marvelous, if you want to know who gets mu goats, it's those killjoy pessimists, even if I have plenty to complain about, you don't hear a peep out of me, what for. I ask you, what for, when life can bring me a day like today; oh, how marvelous it all is: a strange town, and me here with you...

Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of mans 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.

Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it.

political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.

If you don't care about the destination, you don't ask where you're going.

He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.

The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?

Love is a constant interrogation.

En vivant votre misère, vous pouvez être malheureuse ou heureuse. C'est dans ce choix que consiste votre liberté. Vous êtes libre de fondre votre individualité dans la marmite de la multitude avec un sentiment de défaite, ou bien avec euphorie. (...) notre seule liberté est de choisir entre l'amertume et le plaisir. L'insignifiance de tout étant notre lot, il ne faut pas la porter comme une tare, mais savoir s'en réjouir. (ch. 43)

Chi cerca l'infinito non ha che da chiudere gli occhi.

I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people.

vivre dans la vérité, ne mentir ni à soi-même ni aux autres, ce n'est possible qu'à la condition de vivre sans public. Dès lors qu'il y a un témoin à nos actes, nous nous adaptons bon gré mal gré aux yeux qui nous observent, et plus rien de ce que nous faisons n'est vrai. Avoir un public, penser à un public, c'est vivre dans le mensonge (partie III, ch. 7)

Missão, Tereza, é uma palavra idiota. Eu não tenho missão. Ninguém tem missão. E é um alívio enorme perceber que somos livres, que não temos missão.

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about,but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood.

Ä°nsan hiçbir ÅŸeyi, hiçbir kimseyi ciddiye alamay?nca yaÅŸamak ne kadar da hüzün verici!

People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability of suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror, and nothing but horror.