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
maturity mind doe
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
jealousy dog evil
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
plato philosophy love-is
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.
suffering glimpse nostalgia
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more
humility exaggeration-is together
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.
sunset auras unbearable
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
horse men order
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.
unbearable-lightness-of-being partners claims
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
relationship sex facts
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
perfection
There is no perfection only life
love-is definitions definition-of-love
Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
novelists historic given
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
pleasure ambiguity greater
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
crazy love-is crazy-love
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.