Quote

There is no perfection only life

Milan Kundera

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Life
Perfection

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Milan Kundera
Image
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
Milan Kundera
Image
Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
... 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 that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
Milan Kundera
Image
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera
Image
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
Milan Kundera
Image
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
Milan Kundera
Image
Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.
Milan Kundera
Image
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
Image
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Milan Kundera
Image
If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
Image
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
Image
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
Image
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Milan Kundera
Image
Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
Milan Kundera
Image
The beauty of New York is unintentional it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
Milan Kundera