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Speak truth to power.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Speak
Truth
Power

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Milan Kundera
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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
Milan Kundera
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I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect the value of all values.
Milan Kundera
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Milan Kundera
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The beauty of New York is unintentional it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
Milan Kundera
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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
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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
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
Milan Kundera
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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
Milan Kundera
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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
Milan Kundera
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
Milan Kundera
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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
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
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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
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When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
Milan Kundera
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
Milan Kundera
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Milan Kundera
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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
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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