Quotes by Milan Kundera

“For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.”

“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 dont despise women. Misogynist...”

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying ones painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like wa...”

“A person's destiny often ends before his death.”

“There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: I came to realize that there was no p...”

“She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.”

“A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ...”

“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!”

“Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.”

“I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of...”

“He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!”

“The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was establi...”

“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...”

“Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In F...”

“The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explo...”

“She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.”

“As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a sub...”