Quotes from Milan Kundera

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.

when she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague.

You must admit: it's not easy to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it's not easy to become intimate with them, its not easy to love them.

How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!

It was only an idea, a sudden flash, but it kept coming back to me, and I couldn't help thinking, why am I alive, what good is there in going on, but it's not true really, I didn't think anything of the sort, I was hardly thinking at all, I just imagined myself no longer alive and suddenly I felt such bliss, such strange bliss that I wanted to laugh and maybe really did begin to laugh.

Lorsque le cÅ"ur a parlé, il n'estpas convenable que la raison élève des objections. Au royaume du Kitsch s'exerce la dictature du cÅ"ur.

we have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them.. . .No one could be more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.

How she wished she could learn lightness!

dictionary with unsaid words

Elisabeth, can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him?

I believe that in matters of the heart there is no such thing as compromise. Love means that you give each other everything.

He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.

Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like forward and farther are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. (If fascination with the word forward has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)

she thought that after what she had been through during the invasion she would stop being petty and grow up, grow wise and strong, but she had overestimated herself

Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams.

She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.

Tutti noi consideriamo impensabile che l'amore della nostra vita possa essere qualcosa di leggero, qualcosa che non ha peso; riteniamo che il nostro amore sia qualcosa che doveva necessariamente essere; che senza di esso la nostra vita non sarebbe stata la nostra vita. Ci sembra che Beethoven, in persona, torvo e scapigliato, suoni al nostro grande amore il suo Es muss sein!

But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel?

and she thinks, almost joyfully, that it's fine this way because the truth is finally revealed: she feels no need to understand him or to have him understand her.

If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Svijetla kosa i tamna kosa, to su dva pola ljudskog karaktera. Tamna kosa zna?i muževnost, odvažnost, otvorenost i poduzetnost, dok je svijetla kosa simbol ženstvenosti, nježnosti, bespomo?nosti i pasivnosti. Plavuša je, prema tome, dvostruka žena. Princeza mora biti plavokosa. Zato žene, da bi bile ženstvenije, boje kosu u žuto, a nikad u crno.

Tomas ne savait pas, alors, que les métaphores sont une chose dangereuse. On ne badine pas avec les métaphores. L'amour peut naître d'une seule métaphore.

There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her. Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a vailed longing for death.