Quote

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

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
Freedom
Live
Desolation
Constitutes
Unhappy
Choice
Either
Choices
Happy

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
Milan Kundera
Image
Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
Milan Kundera
Image
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Milan Kundera
Image
A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
Image
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Milan Kundera
Image
At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
Image
God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
Milan Kundera
Image
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
Image
Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
Milan Kundera
Image
Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
Milan Kundera
Image
The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.
Milan Kundera
Image
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
Milan Kundera
Image
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
Image
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
Milan Kundera