80 phrases by Milan Kundera (and their meaning)
Milan Kundera is an important Czech poet, playwright and novelist born in 1929. This relevant writer has lived in France since 1975, a country from which he adopted his citizenship in 1987.
Milan Kundera's life would be enough to write a book about him: he was a jazz pianist, a member of the communist party, he was persecuted by the Soviet regime and endless adventures. During his career as a writer, he wrote works of great importance in the society of the time, such as: The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Oblivion or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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The best famous phrases and quotes from Milan Kundera
As readers we must all have read one of his books at some point and if not, this is a good time to do so. Next, We present you 80 very interesting phrases by Milan Kundera, so that you can learn a little more about this writer.
1. There is only one thing that separates us from jazz. Jazz develops and changes rapidly.
As in jazz, we must know how to improvise easily.
2. Jazz has a totally particular melody, in which the original six-tone scale of the old black songs is evident. But also our popular song has its particular melody, even tonally much more varied.
Jazz is a style of music that has its own particularities.
3. It would be so easy to find calm in the world of imagination. But I have always tried to live in both worlds at the same time and not abandon one of them because of the other.
Our thoughts are to a great extent a good part of us, those of us who live in two worlds at the same time: the real and the imaginary.
4. But Luther says in a letter: true love is often unfair.
Just because we love someone doesn't mean that love is reciprocated.
5. He craves the strength of the hunter who hunts a tiger and not the fame of the tiger admired by those who will use it as a rug at the foot of his bed.
In life our willpower is much more important than undeserved fame.
6. There are so many more dead than alive!
Unfortunately, death is an inevitable moment in the life of all of us.
7. I have found a beautiful proverb: true love is always right, even if it is unfair.
No logic can beat love.
8. It's not faith I'm talking about. They are images, ideas. I don't know why I would have to get rid of them.
Having faith in our ideas is something that can be very positive for us, we must believe in them.
9. Man must first of all have the courage to be himself.
Indeed we must know how to express ourselves in all our being.
10. He liked Bach, because he still understood music as a transparent combination of independent voices, each of which can be recognized.
The conception of music through the ideas of the old masters is very different from how jazz musicians understand it.
11. The manufacturing number of the human specimen is the face, that casual and unrepeatable grouping of features. Neither character, nor soul, nor what we call the "I" is reflected in it. The face is only the copy number.
Beauty does not dictate the person we really are, we can be more beautiful or uglier, but that will not affect our personality.
12. Yes, the essence of all love is the child and it doesn't matter if it was conceived or if it was born. In the algebra of love, the son is the magical sign of the sum of two beings.
The vital objective of every living being, after all, is simple: to reproduce.
13. I have the firm will to love you until eternity.
Love is a force that can live in us forever.
14. It may be that only in exceptional circumstances are we aware of our age and most of the time we are ageless.
The age that we have only affects us in certain aspects of our life, outside of them, the age that we have is indifferent.
15. The meaning of poetry does not consist in dazzling us with a surprising idea, but in making an instant of being unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
Poetry can turn the most superfluous aspect of life into something worth remembering.
16. He only became sexual for rare moments, when an instant of arousal radiated him with an unreal, artificial light, making him desirable and beautiful.
The excitement of the moment can lead us to see a person differently from how we see them in another situation of the day.
17. I think, therefore I am, is the comment of an intellectual who underestimates toothache.
As we see in this quote, Kundera makes a little mockery of the work of the famous French philosopher René Descartes.
18. What does it really mean to be useful? The sum of the utility of all people of all times is fully contained in the world as it is today. From which it follows: nothing is more moral than being useless.
Today's society does indeed have serious problems of morality and decadence.
19. "I am not worthy of my suffering." A great phrase. It follows from it that suffering is not only the basis of the self, its only indubitable ontological proof, but it is also of all feelings the one that deserves the greatest respect: the value of all values.
As sentient beings, logically we sometimes suffer and for this reason we are deserving of a certain moral respect.
20. Imagine that you lived in a world where there are no mirrors. You would dream of your face and you would imagine it as an external reflection of what is inside of you. And then, when you were forty years old, someone would put a mirror in front of you for the first time in your life. Imagine the scare! You would see a completely strange face. And you would know clearly what you are not able to understand: your face is not you.
Indeed, our physical appearance does not dictate the person we really are, who we really are is only decided by us with our daily actions.
21. Culture succumbs under the volume of production, the avalanche of letters, the madness of quantity. For this reason I tell you that a book prohibited in your country means infinitely more than the millions of words that our universities vomit.
As a writer, Kundera was morally obliged to produce quality works. In today's world of consumerism, we must not get carried away by the desire to obtain material goods.
22. Because everything in this world is forgiven in advance, and therefore, everything cynically allowed.
All acts should not be forgiven, we must know when something is not acceptable.
23. But it is precisely the weak who have to be strong and know how to leave when the strong is too weak to be able to hurt the weak.
Those who in life are “weaker” must try harder proportionally, therefore, prove to be stronger.
24. It is not necessity, but chance, which is full of charms. If love must be unforgettable, coincidences must fly towards it from the first moment.
Many times we fall in love with someone by chance, that's the beauty of love: we don't decide who we fall in love with.
25. The heaviest load tears us apart, we are knocked down by it, it crushes us to the ground. But in the love poetry of all times the woman wants to carry the weight of the man's body. The heaviest load is therefore, at the same time, the image of the most intense plenitude of life. The heavier the load, the more grounded our life will be, the more real and true it will be.
Life can be painful on many occasions, but in the same way it can also be very beautiful and intense.
26. When she was little, her father taught her to play chess. A movement called castling had caught his attention: the player changes the position of two figures: she puts the rook next to the king and moves the king to the corner, next to the place occupied by the tower. She had liked that movement: the enemy concentrates all his efforts on threatening the king and he suddenly disappears before his eyes; she goes to live elsewhere. She dreamed all her life of that movement and she dreamed of it all the more the more tired she was.
Castling is a move that allows us to run away and defend at the same time, a move that we all want to make in more than one situation in life.
27. Despite my skepticism, some superstition has remained. For example, this strange conviction that all the stories that happen in life also have a meaning, they mean something. That life, with its own history, says something about itself, that it gradually reveals some of its secrets to us, that it lies before us like a riddle that must be solved.
Many of us believe in the figure of destiny, that there is something for which we are destined or born for it.
28. Men want to own the future just so they can change the past. They struggle to enter the laboratory where photographs are touched up and biographies and history are rewritten.
In life we struggle to define who we are, to teach those around us what we are capable of.
29. Children are not the future because one day they will be older, but because humanity is going to get closer and closer to the child, because childhood is the image of the future.
Everything that humanity will achieve in the future depends solely and exclusively on today's children.
30. Women don't look for beautiful men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Therefore, having an ugly lover is a fatal mistake.
Both men and women look for beauty in our partner, because that beauty means that we too are beautiful enough to deserve it. In the same way, beauty is something subjective, each person has their own version of what beauty is.
31. Loves are like empires: when the idea on which they have been built disappears, they too perish.
Both men and empires, the passing of the years wreaks havoc on them, undoubtedly leading them to their demise.
32. The twilight of disappearance bathes everything with the magic of nostalgia.
When something disappears from the world, the memory of it leads us to miss it. Nostalgia is always an emotion that appears too late.
33. There is nothing heavier than understanding. Not even one's own pain is so heavy that the pain felt, by someone, for someone, multiplied by the imagination, prolonged in a thousand echoes.
Not all of us are capable of feeling the pain of others, of having enough empathy for it.
34. Love, by definition, is an undeserved gift.
Love is something that we do not deserve nor do we stop deserving, we simply do not have control over it.
35. The true goodness of man can only manifest itself with absolute cleanliness and freedom in relation to someone who does not represent any force.
Indeed, in order to demonstrate our authentic goodness, we must exercise it on the one who does not cause us any good, nor any evil.
36. He erased her from the photograph of her life, not because he hadn't loved her, but precisely because he loved her. He erased her along with the love he felt for her.
When we love someone and lose them, forgetting about that person can be an arduous task.
37. The unfortunate man seeks consolation in the amalgamation of his own grief with the grief of another.
We should not rejoice in the pain of others to mitigate our own, as the saying goes: evil for others, consolation for fools.
38. Eroticism is like dancing: one part of the couple is always in charge of managing the other.
With our way of acting and our actions, we can predispose a reaction in our partner, be it in the sexual field or in any other.
39. I dare to affirm that there is no authentic eroticism without the art of ambiguity; when the ambiguity is powerful, the more alive the excitement.
Eroticism is the art of awakening in the other person a certain sexual desire, starting from an initial ambiguity.
40. Excitement is the foundation of eroticism, its deepest enigma, its keyword.
When we are excited, our actions and thoughts are the result or perhaps a consequence of said emotion.
41. Happiness is the yearning for repetition.
When we are happy living an experience, we always want to repeat it again.
42. Love is not manifested in the desire to sleep with someone, but in the desire to sleep next to someone.
As this quote says very well, sleeping with someone is one thing and sleeping with that person is another.
43. The true test of humanity's morality, the deepest (located so deep that it escapes our perception), lies in its relationship with those who are at its mercy: animals.
Animals are sentient living beings, which consequently deserve all our love and respect.
44. The nostalgia for paradise is the desire of man not to be a man.
Paradise is a utopian idea that is impossible to achieve, but that is why it is so attractive.
45. I write for the pleasure of contradicting and for the happiness of being alone against everyone.
Without a doubt Kundera was aware of his unique personality and at times he felt perhaps a little removed from society.
46. Man can never know what he should want, because he lives only one life and he has no way of comparing it with his previous lives or amending it in his later lives. There is no possibility of checking which of the decisions is the best, because there is no comparison. Man lives everything at first and without preparation. As if an actor represented his work without any kind of rehearsal. But what value can life have if the first test to live is already life itself?
We learn what we want to achieve and how we should achieve it, with the passage of time and as a result of the experience of the situations we experience.
47. Who looks for the infinite that close his eyes.
We all have an inner world that can be as rich as our imagination allows us.
48. The fight of the human being against power is the fight of memory against oblivion.
In order not to fall into the same mistakes, we must remember where we came from.
49. All the great novels, the true novels, are bisexual.
All types of sexuality must be respected equally, today's society is still in the fight for sexual freedoms.
50. Flirting is a proposal for sex without guarantee.
A very curious way of understanding this attitude. Have you ever thought in a similar way?
51. Life is the memory of the people, the collective consciousness of historical continuity, the way of thinking and living.
Indeed, "real life" is the result of the sum of how we live and how we think.
52. Speed is the form of ecstasy that the technical revolution has brought to man.
Technologically, human civilization does not stop advancing, moreover, it is doing so at a greater speed.
53. In such a world where everything is told, the most easily accessible and deadly weapon is disclosure.
We can do a lot of damage to someone, divulging his ideas and thoughts.
54. Unknowingly, man composes his life according to the laws of beauty, even in moments of deepest despair.
Unfortunately we get carried away to a large extent by appearances, something that we should certainly change in society.
55. He despises literature in which the authors reveal all the intimacies of him and his friends. The person who loses his privacy loses everything.
We must know what things we can tell and what things it is better not to, our most personal issues should not be aired.
56. Loneliness: a sweet absence of glances.
Loneliness is something that no person wants for himself.
57. Everything depends on the man being as he is, that he is not ashamed of wanting what he wants and wanting what he wants. People are often slaves to ordinances.
Being consistent with ourselves will allow us to achieve our life goals.
58. All the basic situations of life are without return. For man to be man, he has to go through the impossibility of return with full awareness.
As we move forward in life, we leave behind incorrect attitudes and ways of thinking.
59. Man can expect a woman to do anything, but if he doesn't want to behave like a savage, he has to make it possible for her to act on her deepest fictions.
As men we must always act honestly, whether when we interact with women or with other men.
60. She had always lived simultaneously in two worlds. She had believed in their mutual harmony. It was a hoax. She now she had been expelled from one of those worlds. From the real world. I only have the imagination.
We must know how to live in the society where we find ourselves, thoughts can be something very important but they should not be 100 percent of our lives.
61. In front of her I could allow myself everything: even sincerity, feeling and pathos.
The person who truly loves us will do so completely, with our virtues and our defects.
62. I understood that she could not run away from the memories of her; that he was surrounded by them.
Memories are a fundamental part of us and will accompany us throughout our lives.
63. People often talk about love at first sight; I know perfectly well that love tends to make a legend of itself and retrospectively mythologize its beginnings; I do not mean, therefore, to say that it was a question of such a sudden love; but what there was was a certain clairvoyance: the essence of Lucie's being - or to be more precise - the essence of what later Lucie was for me, I understood it, I felt it, I saw it immediately and in followed; Lucie brought me to herself just as revealed truths are brought to people.
Some people have experienced love at first sight and Milan Kundera is one of those people.
64. The supporters of joy are usually the saddest.
We all want joy in our lives, but sometimes it can be elusive.
65. Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy spirit stinks of idiocy. Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.
Milan Kundera, he was not a great follower of the ideas of Leon Trotsky.
66. Because living in a world where nothing is forgiven to anyone, where no one can redeem themselves, is the same as living in hell.
Forgiveness is something that we can achieve, but it will depend on the action we have taken previously.
67. He did not have, like the hypocrites, a true face and false faces. He had several faces because he was young and I myself did not know who he was and who he wanted to be.
When we haven't developed as people, we tend to flirt with various attitudes to find which one we feel most comfortable with.
68. This time he added to his speech new ideas: the class enemy had managed to directly penetrate the communist party; But spies and traitors should know that masked enemies would receive a hundred treatment. times worse than those who did not hide their opinions from him, because the masked enemy is a mangy dog.
Without a doubt, we must be consistent with our own ideas, since they largely determine who we really are.
69. Being mortal is the most essential human experience and yet man has never been able to accept it, understand it and behave accordingly. Man does not know how to be mortal. And when he dies he doesn't even know he's dead.
Many times we are not fully aware of the risks we take, we go through life believing ourselves to be immortal beings.
70. How to live in a world with which one does not agree? How can you live with people if you don't consider their sorrows or their joys to be yours? If you know you are not part of them.
In order to be completely happy we will have to find our place in the world, for this we must know what we want from life and how we will achieve it.
71. Because that's the only real life for me: living in someone else's thought. If not, I'm dead in life.
We would all like to know what others think, this is a very recurring thought in all men and women.
72. Love or the convent: two ways in which man can reject the divine computer, two ways to escape from it.
A very curious way of understanding life, in the end we all want to escape ourselves in some way.
73. Living, in that there is no happiness. To live: to carry his pained self through the world. But to be, to be is happiness. Being: becoming a source, a stone container on which the universe falls like a warm rain.
In order to be happy, we must know how to represent our best version and show it to the world.
74. Life is for you a conditioned value, which is justified only because it allows you to live your love. The one you love is for you more than divine Creation, more than life.
Love is a very powerful force, which can greatly limit or enhance our actions in life.
75. Man is nothing more than the image of him. Philosophers can tell us that what the world thinks of us is irrelevant, that only what we are is worth. But philosophers understand nothing. To the extent that we live with people, we are no more than what people think we are.
Society is governed to a large extent by the image that we show it, our image will allow us to receive better attitudes from others towards us.
76. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as nice as possible is considered a kind of fallacy or cheating game. But is there any direct relationship between my "I" and theirs without the mediation of the eyes?
Pre-established canons of beauty give us in a "simple" way an explanation of what others want to observe.
77. Unfortunately, we lack Descartes. That is an unforgivable insufficiency in our history. Germany does not have a tradition of reason and clarity, it is full of metaphysical fogs and Wagnerian music and we all know who Wagner's greatest admirer was: Hitler!
In this quote, Kundera attacks the German society of the time, which caused the writer himself great emotional sorrow.
78. The basis of modesty is not our mistake, but the opprobrium, the humiliation that we feel for having to be what we are without having chosen it and the unbearable sensation that this humiliation is seen from all parts.
We must be grateful for the person we are and what we represent in society, to achieve happiness we must first accept ourselves.
79. I cannot hate them because nothing unites me with them; I have nothing to do with them.
We cannot hate what we do not know, hate is a very visceral emotion that comes from the previous wrong suffered by us.
80. The danger of hate is that it binds us to the adversary in a close embrace.
Indeed, when we enter a spiral of hatred, we always find ourselves involved in situations with that person we hate so much.