Quotes by Milan Kundera

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

“Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.”

“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 drun...”

“Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .”

“He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears. He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly fill...”

“We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we me...”

“The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.”

“Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing.”

“The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fo...”

“In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.”

“The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction ...”

“On her way toward the shore, she kept coming across weekend tourists. Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking besid...”

“Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me but a woman. Our love in t...”

“Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhals or Faulkners.”

“For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.”

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

“He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.”

“Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a bars...”

“Laughing deeply is living deeply.”

“Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met hi...”