Quotes from Milan Kundera

The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.

because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It differentiated her from the others

Love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.