Quotes from Milan Kundera

Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future.

Non certo la necessità, bensì il caso è pieno di magia. Se l'amore deve essere indimenticabile, fin dal primo istante devono posarsi su di esso le coincidenze, come gli uccelli sulle spalle di Francesco d'Assisi.

Oh, all that was so far away, almost forgotten. But during her mother's five-day stay in Paris, that feeling of inferiority, of weakness, of dependency came over her again.

A??r? uçlar, ard?nda yaÅŸam?n sona erdiÄŸi s?n?rlar demektir ve sanatta da politikada da, a??r?l??a duyulan tutku, ölüme duyulan örtük bir özlemdir asl?nda.

We wanted to destroy the world. With our messianism we nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their selfishness will save it.

Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.

In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell.

No se puede medir el afecto mutuo de dos seres humanos por el número de palabras que intercambian

How can she explain to Gustaf that within the magic circle of maternal energy, Irena has never manage to rule over her own life? How can she explain that the constant proximity of the mother would throw her back, into her weakness, her immaturity?

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

Na frente estava a mentira inteligível, e atrás a incompreensível verdade.

Wer den Ort verlassen will, an dem er lebt, der ist nicht glücklich.

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcome into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased (..describing how Karenin, Tereza's pet dog welcomed each day)

Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy towards our work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

El hombre lo vive todo a la primera y sin preparación. Como si un actor representase su obra sin ningún tipo de ensayo. Pero ¿qué valor puede tener la vida si el primer ensayo para vivir es ya la vida misma? Por eso la vida parece un boceto. Pero ni siquiera boceto es la palabra precisa, porque un boceto es siempre un borrador de algo, la preparación para un cuadro, mientras que el boceto que es nuestra vida es un boceto para nada, un borrador sin cuadro.

O desejo de ordem é, ao mesmo tempo desejo de morte, porque a vida é perpétua violação da ordem. Ou, inversamente, o desejo de ordem é um pretexto virtuoso através do qual o ódio do homem pelo homem justifica as suas malfeitorias.

Con las metáforas no se juega. El amor puede surgir de una sola metáfora.

A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful shell.

And that was exactly her gamble: that they'd accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a a naive young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she's proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it'll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won't stay.

No veía una llamativa desproporción entre la insignificancia de la causa y la enormidad del acto? ¿Acaso no sabía si lo que proyectaba hacer era excesivo? Sí, pero precisamente lo que le atraía era el exceso. No quería ser razonable. No quería ser comedida. No quería medir, no quería razonar. Admiraba su propia pasión, aún sabiendo que la pasión, por definición, es un exceso. Como ebria, no quería salir de esa ebriedad.

What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias - constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal.

No hay nada más pesado que la compasión. Ni siquiera el propio dolor es tan pesado como el dolor sentido con alguien, por alguien, para alguien, multiplicado por la imaginación, prolongado en mil ecos.