Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kunderais a Czech-born writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores"...
NationalityCzechoslovakian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 April 1929
ideas may hammers
A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
thinking ideas mad
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
catholic empires prague
Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.
thinking facts entertainment
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
years long noise
Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
real men air
The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
animal compassion unbearable-lightness-of-being
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
beauty body-image goodness
How goodness heightens beauty!
courage law coincidence-in-life
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
discovery criticism critics
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
people feelings common
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
rehearsal firsts unbearable
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
eye past glances
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
men people fellow-man
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.