Quote

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

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
Fear
Fragments
Inspirational
Caught
Past
Cutting
Persons
Source
Hunched
Person
Present
Slowness
Nothing
Focus
Fragment
Men
Freedom
Freed
Time
Future
Motorcycle

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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
She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
Milan Kundera
Image
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
Milan Kundera
Image
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
Milan Kundera
Image
The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
Milan Kundera
Image
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
Milan Kundera
Image
Speak truth to power.
Milan Kundera
Image
This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
Milan Kundera
Image
What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
Milan Kundera
Image
The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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
There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera
Image
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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
Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera