Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
Milan Kundera
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Men
Dies
Mortal
Experience
Grasp
Doesn
Mortals
Able
Behave
Human
Basic
Humans
Accept
Even
Accepting
Never
Dead
Accordingly
More quotes by Milan Kundera
Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
Milan Kundera
...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
Milan Kundera
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
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
Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
Milan Kundera
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
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
She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
Milan Kundera
I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
Milan Kundera
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
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
Milan Kundera
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Milan Kundera
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
Milan Kundera
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Milan Kundera
Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
Milan Kundera
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
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
Milan Kundera
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
Milan Kundera