Quotes from Milan Kundera

Jedino Å¡to nam preostaje pobuna je protiv sudbine koju nismo izabrali.

If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a myth, that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch

Too much faith is the worst ally

Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

The ostriches were like messengers who had learned their vital message by heart, but whose vocal chords had been slit by the enemy, so that when they finally reached their goal, all they could do was move their mouths.

The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about.

people do need some commandment to rule over them in our century, when god's ten have been virtually forgotten! the whole moral structure of our time rests on the eleventh commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining a power undreamed of by a hemingway or an orwell.

How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him?

Man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and enjoy it. What's more he longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway

When young people's education is at stake, compromise is crime.

I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.

In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted

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

But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

he could not quite understand what had happened. he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them

Estuve tanto tiempo mirándome al espejo que al final me convencí de que lo que veía era yo.

love doesn't make itself felt in the desire for copulation ( a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)

The crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death.

Insofar as it is possible to divide people in categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity.Every Frenchman is different. But all actors are similar.

all languages that derive from Latin form the word compassion by combining the prefix meaning with (com-) and the root meaning suffering

he realized that the path of love, which Bertlef had suggested, was closed to him; it was the path of saints, not of ordinary men.

This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive,' 'fabricated,' and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic.' Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.