Quote

The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

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
Joseph
Attracts
Begins
Moment
Death
Moments
Posthumous
Kafka

More quotes by 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
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
Milan Kundera
Image
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
Milan Kundera
Image
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
Image
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
Milan Kundera
Image
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Milan Kundera
Image
Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
Milan Kundera
Image
Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
Image
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
Image
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
Milan Kundera
Image
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan Kundera
Image
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
Milan Kundera
Image
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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
The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Milan Kundera
Image
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
Milan Kundera