Milan Kundera

goal higher vertigo voice emptiness

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

dogs link paradise jealousy discontent peace

“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 (1929-2023)

compassion pain others

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

greek return nostosalgos suffering nostalgia yarning

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

Plato symposium people hemaphrodite split love half lost

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

perfection life

“There is no perfection only life”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

fact death takes everything

“Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

laugh live profoundly

“To laugh is to live profoundly.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

world unfree people unlearned liberty

“The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

responsible ignorance

“A man is responsible for his ignorance.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

women change meaning action event

“Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

think toothache idea pain self

“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

feeling censon action remark control

“...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

humanity moral test mercy animals

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

liquidate people erase memory books culture history invent

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

struggle man power forgetting

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

future void past life change

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

stupidity people answer wisdom novel question

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

present blindfolded sense guess glance past experience meaning

"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

memory film photograph

"Memory does not make films, it makes photographs."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

ambition excuse sense lazy

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

progress step end

"People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

long order death life incessant disruption

"The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order."

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

heart speaks mind indecent object

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object"

― Milan Kundera (1929-2023)