Quotes by Milan Kundera

“It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.”

“The man raised his glass, 'To you!'Can't you think of a wittier t”

“She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful t...”

“Because misogynists are the best of men.” All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: “Please understand me. Misogynists don’t despise women. Misogyn...”

“Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!”

“How was she to reconcile men's desire with the desire to be beautiful in their eyes? At first she had tried for a compromise (desperate journeys abroad, where nobody knew her and no indiscretion co...”

“Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.”

“No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessari...”

“Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I shou...”

“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper ...”

“Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible ...”

“I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, wa...”

“Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such...”

“Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today ...”

“I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly rea...”

“A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds lurk in the sky to pounce on a weasel or a mous...”

“How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal ...”

“When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.”

“Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?”

“Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.”