Quotes from Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

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.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Love is basically like leaches .... They suck until they cant get enough of you. Until you find a catapillar that will turn into the butterfly that you have wished for all of your life. Then they just spread their wings and fly away.

O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

Ah, the joy of suckling! She lovingly watched the fishlike motions of the toothless mouth and she imagined that with her milk there flowed into her little son her deepest thoughts, concepts, and dreams.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

Like parodies of themselves, theological notions are reflected in the triviality of our lives.

You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

When she first felt her son's groping mouth attach itself to her breast, a wave of sweet vibration thrilled deep inside and radiated to all parts of her body; it was similar to love, but it went beyond a lover's caress, it brought a great calm happiness, a great happy calm.

The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.