...beauty is a spark which flares up when two ages meet across the distance of time,...beauty is a clean sweep of chronology, a rebellion against time. - Milan Kundera
I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you. - Milan Kundera
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. - Milan Kundera
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. - Milan Kundera
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. - Milan Kundera
It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends - Milan Kundera
عشق ورزی چون رقص است.انسان همیشه دیگری را همراه خود میکشاند. - Milan Kundera
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. - Milan Kundera
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. - Milan Kundera
Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back. - Milan Kundera
For what is love if one loves a woman without knowing her? Just a decision to love? Or even an imitation? The question concerns us all: If, from our childhood on, the examples of love were not there inviting us to copy them, would we know what "loving" means? - Milan Kundera
That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. - Milan Kundera
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. - Milan Kundera
Laughing deeply is living deeply. - Milan Kundera
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone. - Milan Kundera
To laugh is to live profoundly. - Milan Kundera
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? - Milan Kundera
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. - Milan Kundera
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. - Milan Kundera
All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests... - Milan Kundera
and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies. - Milan Kundera
If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es Muss sein! - Milan Kundera
Menschen begegnen sich im Leben, plaudern, diskutieren, streiten miteinander, ohne sich bewusst zu machen, dass sie aus großer Entfernung miteinander sprechen, jeder von einem Beobachtungsposten aus, der in einem anderen Ort in der Zeit steht. - Milan Kundera
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love - Milan Kundera
Solitude: sweet absence of faces. - Milan Kundera
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange. - Milan Kundera
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful. - Milan Kundera
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company. - Milan Kundera
Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it. - Milan Kundera
Estoy bajo el agua y los latidos de mi corazón producen círculos en la superficie. - Milan Kundera
Et là est l'horreur: le passé dont on se souvient est dépourvu de temps. Impossible de revivre un amour comme on relit un livre ou comme on revoit un film. - Milan Kundera
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. - Milan Kundera
We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles. - Milan Kundera
Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves. - Milan Kundera
It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas. - Milan Kundera