Discover my favorite and most inspiring Milan Kundera quotes about love and life through his well-known and prize-winning books. Milan Kundera is a Chech and French writer who was born in the Chech city of Brno in 1929. But he has lived in France and he became a French citizen. He has won several literature prizes like the International Herder Prize, Kafka Prize, etc. In his writings, he connects historical events, political and philosophical concepts, and common stories of everyday people with artistic skillfulness. And, their outcome is timeless masterpieces.
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Indeed, I have already read most of Milan Kundera’s books from my early 20s and more than once. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Immortality, Life is Elsewhere, Ignorance, Identity, The Joke, and Laughable Loves. Milan Kundera was and still is one of my favorite writers. His deep philosophical analyses of his characters with a sarcastic view are what intrigues me the most. A love story has the complexity of a Kafka-inspired plot that manifests the essence of human existence.
Yet, in a conversation I had with friends during the previous week, I realized that I had to read his books again. I feel that after years their stories seem to fade from my mind. So, this post is a way to reread his quotes about the critical issues of our existence like love and freedom, chance and fate, etc, and contemplate.
“There is no perfection only life.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“We can never know what to want because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come”.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
Milan Kundera
“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching,…, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”
Milan Kundera, The book of Laughter and Forgetting
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“We must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”
Milan Kundera, Immortality
“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”
Milan Kundera
“The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
Milan Kundera
“I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“To imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs”.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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