Ten Unforgettable Quotes From Milan Kundera
All Milan Kundera quotes are works of art. Most are part of his beautiful and extensive literary work. Not only do his novels contain beautiful plots, they also contain a profound reflection on the world and modern man.
Milan Kundera was born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia. However, in 1975 he moved to France and in 1981 he took French nationality. Despite the fact that he no longer lived in his homeland in his later years, much of his work is about life in Czechoslovakia.
His work demonstrates an intelligent writer with the ability to delve into the labyrinth of the human subconscious. For years, people have been expecting him to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for the quality of his writing. Here we present an interesting (though incomplete) selection of some of his best quotes.
One of Milan Kundera’s unforgettable quotes
This thinker is not just a great writer. He has proved to be a great philosopher of our time. His vision of the world is very realistic and at the same time deeply moving. One of his great virtues is knowing how to capture unconscious motivation.
This is exactly what many of his quotes reflect – a deep understanding of man. That idea is captured in this interesting text about our obsession with order:
Power and the world
Almost all of Kundera’s Czechoslovak work is characterized by themes of power. He is highly critical of power and its morality. In this quote, for example:
Kundera lived under the Soviet regime. Restrictions imposed by the regime on thoughts and expression deeply affected him. Another quote from Milan Kundera reads:
He is right. The secret of what power seeks to promote lies in the things it forbids.
The same is true in this quote: “Man’s struggle against power is memory’s struggle against forgetting.” Power reproduces human vice and meanness. Every power figure tries to make everyone believe that it all starts with him or her. But often enough, history just repeats itself. Memory is the only thing that breaks the cycle.
Love and fear
Love is one of the themes present in all of this author’s work. In The Unbearable Lightness of Existence he relates it to a happy coincidence. In this book he writes:
Many Milan Kundera quotes also deal with indifference and forgetting. The following quote discusses the subject in a beautifully poetic way:
When someone, or something, is no longer with you, reality is covered in an suggestive and magical veil.
Fear and the others
The main cause of fear is what has not yet occurred. The possibility that it could happen allows fear into our lives. In reality, however, we fear the products of our imagination rather than real life.
When confronted with the world, we always experience a rift, a division, a strangeness. Kundera puts it this way:
Understanding and vulnerability
Many quotes from Kundera talk about vulnerability and compassion. In fact, animals have a privileged place in his writing. Both for what they are and for what they represent.
Compassion between people also implies suffering. This quote makes it very clear:
In other words, sometimes it hurts more to see a loved one suffer than to suffer yourself.
Finally, these quotes from Kundera are just a small part of his wonderful work. It is not for nothing that he is one of the most admired contemporary writers in the world. Unlike so many, he managed to capture the essence of our time. And then he expressed it in a beautiful and amazing way in his writing.
