Quote

it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

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
Mysterious
Chide
Daily
Deprives
Blind
Coincidences
Novel
Thereby
Beauty
Dimension
Wrong
Coincidence
Right
Dimensions
Men
Fascinated

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Milan Kundera
Image
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
Milan Kundera
Image
...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
Milan Kundera
Image
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
Image
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Milan Kundera
Image
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
Image
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
Milan Kundera
Image
Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
Milan Kundera
Image
We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
Milan Kundera
Image
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
Image
Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
Milan Kundera
Image
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
Milan Kundera
Image
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
Image
A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
Milan Kundera
Image
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
Milan Kundera
Image
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
Milan Kundera
Image
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Milan Kundera
Image
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Milan Kundera
Image
The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
Milan Kundera