Quote

On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.

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
Chaos
Surface
Lying
Truth
Unintelligible
Intelligible
Underneath

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
Milan Kundera
Image
Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
Milan Kundera
Image
I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Milan Kundera
Image
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.
Milan Kundera
Image
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
Image
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
Image
Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
Milan Kundera
Image
To laugh is to live profoundly.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Milan Kundera
Image
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
Milan Kundera
Image
At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
Image
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Milan Kundera
Image
I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
Milan Kundera
Image
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
Milan Kundera
Image
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Milan Kundera