Friday, March 29, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Milan Kundera


Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Moravia, now the Czech Republic.
Milan Kundera
But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
Kundera quotes
It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.
Kundera
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.




Kundera Milan quotes
Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Kundera Milan
The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
Milan Kundera quotes
Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
Milan Kundera
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
Kundera Milan quotes
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
Kundera
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
Kundera Milan
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Milan Kundera
"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.




Milan Kundera quotes
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
Milan Kundera
He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.
Kundera quotes
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.
Kundera Milan
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.
Kundera Milan quotes
She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."
Milan Kundera
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.
Milan Kundera quotes
Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.
Milan Kundera
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?
Kundera Milan
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.


© 2009–2013Quotes Privacy Policy | Contact