"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."
— Milan Kundera

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
— Milan Kundera

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
— Milan Kundera

""He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”"
— Milan Kundera

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into 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?"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"There is no perfection only life"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"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 first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers."
— Milan Kundera

"A single metaphor can give birth to love."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"I have no mission. No one has."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
— Milan Kundera

"Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
— Milan Kundera

"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
— Milan Kundera

"Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""Happiness is the longing for repetition." "
— Milan Kundera

"she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Humanity's true moral test,its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy:animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
— Milan Kundera

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can never compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone? There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison."
— Milan Kundera

"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. [published in 1979]"
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

""A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting "
— Milan Kundera

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists"
— Milan Kundera

""Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.""
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.""
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal?…Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown."
— Milan Kundera

"Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
— Milan Kundera

""Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
"Love is a battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting." And he left."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth to be a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think?...If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself."
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia. "
— Milan Kundera

"The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."
— Milan Kundera (Ignorance: A Novel)

"Physical love is unthinkable without violence."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)