Quotes from Milan Kundera

If every life is unique, let's live uniquely. Let's reject everything that is not fresh and new. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.

Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.

GeleceÄŸe egemen olmak istenilmesinin nedeni, geçmiÅŸi deÄŸiÅŸtirecek güce sahip olmaktan baÅŸka bir ÅŸey deÄŸildir.

It was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.

Her beauty, which struck him at the time, did not make her look younger than her age; he might sooner have said that her age made her beauty more eloquent.

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes.

Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained. Saturday found him for the first time strolling alone through Zurich, breathing in the heady smell of his freedom. New adventures hid around each corner. The future was again a secret.

The different arts reach our brains in different ways; they lodge there with differing ease, at different speeds, with different degrees of inevitable simplifications; and for different durations

Un valor vulnerado y una ilusión desenmascarada suelen tener el cuerpo igual de mortificado, se parecen, y no hay nada más fácil que confundirlos.

That's how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even 'the plainest' of them, the least exhibitionist, because it's not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.

The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross

Is it right to raise one's voice when others are being silenced? Yes.

It made her unhappy, and down in the street she asked herself why she should bother to maintain contact with Czechs. What bound her to them? The landscape? If each of them were asked to say what the name of his native country evoked in him, the images that came to mind would be so different as to rule out all possibility of unity

Mendengarkan warta berita sama saja dengan menghisap sebatang rokok yang segera kita buang jika habis.

A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life - these were the gifts she had left him.

Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.

What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times a thought can be refuted , yes, but not retracted . (p. 179)

Laughter was like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room with them; but hidden behind a thin wall.

El placer de la mistificación debía protegeros. Ésa fue de hecho nuestra estrategia, la de todos nosotros. Comprendimos desde hace mucho que ya no era posible subvertir el mundo, ni remodelarlo, ni detener su pobre huida hacia delante. Sólo había una resistencia posible: no tomarlo en serio.

Music is the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartók's Sonata for two pianos and percussion, or the Beatles' White album?

She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting.

We can never know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our precious lives nor perfect it in our lives to come