Quotes by Milan Kundera

“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. Its 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.”

“Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.”

“A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.”

“High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, theyre all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.”

“I find myself fascinating.”

“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

“O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”

“Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.”

“A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that persons instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.”

“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.”

“How goodness heightens beauty!”

“Innovation comes from the producer -- not from the customer.”

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

“This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them......”

“Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.”

“The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because theyre going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, thats beautiful.