Quotes from Milan Kundera

The only thing that makes me somewhat sceptical regarding human procreation is the unintelligent selection of parents. Some of the most unattractive individuals in the world feel they must multiply at all costs. They are apparently under the illusion that the burden of ugliness becomes lighter if it is shared with descendants.

To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness

Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day.

a person who thinks should not try to persuade others to his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the man of conviction; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the man of conviction is a man restricted.

But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.

Whe you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief requires a tremendous effort and the proper training.

We can never establish with certainty which part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions--love, antipathy, charity, or malice--and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

Tous les hommes politiques d'aujourd'hui, selon Pontevin, sont un peu danseurs, et tous les danseurs se mêlent de politique, ce qui, toutefois, ne devrait pas nous amener à les confondre. Le danseur se distingue de l'homme politique ordinaire en ceci qu'il ne désire pas le pouvoir mais la gloire ; il ne désire pas imposer au monde telle ou telle organisation sociale (il s'en soucie comme d'une guigne) mais occuper la scène pour faire rayonner son moi.

Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live.

He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage. But just what is that shrinkage? Is it the real shrinkage of a person abandoning his adult dimensions and starting on the long journey through old age and death toward distances where there is only a nothingness without dimension?

They love their bodies. We neglected ours. They love to travel. We stayed put. They love adventure. We spent all our time at meetings. They love jazz. We were satisfied with pale imitations of folk music. They're interested in themselves. We wanted to save the world and with our messianic vision nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their egotism will be the ones to save it.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. [...] We die without knowing what we have lived.

Necessity knows no magic formuae—they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Ni jedna ljubav ne može preživjeti u šutnji.

My dear colleagues, as you know, the greatest misfortune for a man is a happy marriage; he hasn't the slightest hope of a divorce.

Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.

The entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout 'We are all writers!' For everyone is pained with the thought of disappearing, unheard, and unseen into an indifferent universe and because of that, everyone wants, wither there's still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Teraza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and a lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.

terrible are the wounds of a murdered dream

You know what it's like when two people start a conversation. First one of them does all the talking, the other breaks in with That's just like me, I... and goes on himself until his partner finds a chance to say, That's just like me, I... The That's just like me, I... 's may look like a form of agreement, a way of carrying the other party's idea a step further, but that is an illusion...

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.

to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?