Quotes from Milan Kundera

When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway.

But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness.

God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.

Delante hay una mentira comprensible y tras ella reluce una verdad incomprensible.

Vlasta me reprocha que soy un soñador. Parece que no veo las cosas tal como son. No, veo las cosas tal como son, pero además de las cosas visibles veo también las invisibles. Las ideas inventadas no son algo inútil. Son precisamente ellas las que hacen de nuestras casas hogares

He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world and make friends.

La felicidad es el deseo de repetir.

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

He took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.

Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for 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. Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up.

Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual's life.

Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.

And I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but at least was asbolutely serious about marrying her one day

Fare l'amore con una donna e dormire con una donna sono due passioni non solo diverse, ma quasi opposte. L'amore non si manifesta col desiderio di fare l'amore (desiderio che si applica a una quantità infinita di donne) ma col desiderio di dormire insieme (desiderio che si applica a un' unica donna).

Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.

La lutte de l'homme contre le pouvoir est la lutte de la mémoire contre l'oubli.

in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

Suicide is worse than murder. One can murder for vengeance or out of greed, but even greed is the expression of a perverted love of life. But to commit suicide is to throw one's life down contemptuously at God's feet

Mientras que las personas son jóvenes y la composición musical de su vida está aún en los primeros compases, pueden escribirla juntas e intercambiarse motivos, pero cuando se encuentran y ya son mayores, sus composiciones musicales están más o menos cerradas y cada palabra, cada objeto significa una cosa distinta en la composición de la una y en la de la otra

Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge.

Al final del verdadero amor está la muerte y sólo un amor que termina en muerte es amor

We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power...All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.

Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe—no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.

Ljudsko vrijeme se ne okre?e u krugu, ve? juri po pravoj liniji naprijed. To je razlog zašto ?ovjek ne može biti sretan, jer je sre?a ?ežnja za ponavljanjem.