Milan Kundera Quotes - The Unbearable Lightness of Being Quotes

Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give orders. There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence...What if she had a man who ordered her about? A man who wanted to master her? How long would she put up with him? Not five minutes! From which it follows that no man was right for her. Strong or weak.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Laughing deeply is living deeply.

Milan Kundera



The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera, Interview on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting



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



That night, she made love to him with greater frenzy than ever before, aroused by the realization that this was the last time. Making love, she was far, far away. Once more she heard the golden horn of betrayal beckoning her in the distance, and she knew she would not hold out. She sensed an expanse of freedom before her, and the boundlessness of it excited her. She made mad, unrestrained love to Franz as she never had before.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



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 Unbearable Lightness of Being



Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Solitude: sweet absence of faces.

Milan Kundera, Imortality



If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to test the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypothesis.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Einmal ist Keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of Czechs will not be repeated, not will the history of Europe. The history of the Czech and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of human life, unbearably light, light as a feature, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them 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.

Let us suppose that such it the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who one formed part of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth?

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the "Es muss sein!" of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



The feeling induced by kitsch must be kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tears says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Why was the word "idyll" so important to Tereza?

Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Franz sobbed as he lay on top of her; he was certain he understood: Sabina had been quiet all through dinner and said not a word about his decision, but this was her answer. She has made a clear show of her joy, her passion, her consent, her desire to live with him forever.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



It is completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; She did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor has she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anybody more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. 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 to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being





"I used to admire believers", Tomas continued. "I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son's experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, had had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple."

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being







When Tereza came back from the dance floor with the young man, the chairman asked her to dance, and finally Tomas has a turn with her, too.

"Tomas", she said to him out on the floor, "everything bad that's happened in your life is my fault. It's my fault you ended up here, as low as you could possibly go."

"Low? What are you talking about?"

"If we has stayed in Zurich, you'd still be a surgeon."

"And you'd be a photographer."

"That's a silly comparison to make," said Tereza, "Your work meant everything to you; I don't care what I do, I can do anything, I haven't lost a thing; you've lost everything."

"Haven't you notice I've been happy here, Tereza?" Tomas said.

"Surgery was your mission," she said.

"Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission, No one has. And it's a a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions."

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being







Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not 'Es muss sein!' (It must be so), but rather 'Es konnte auch anders sein' (It could just as well be otherwise).

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Seven years earlier, a complex neurological case happened to have been discovered at the hospital in Tereza's town. They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital happened to be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the provincial hospital in his place. The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed. He happened to have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant. Tereza happened to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas's table. It had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if he had little inclination to go to her on his own.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

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. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup...

Necessity knows no magic formulae -- they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being





For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs as 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





He felt like a rider galloping off into a magnificent void, a void of no wife, no daughter, no household, the magnificent void swept clean by Hercules' broom, a magnificent void he would fill with his love.

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...Then there is the third category, the category of who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love...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.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being





Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by universities.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being





The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Milan Kundera, Immortality





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



Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting



To laugh is to live profoundly.

Milan Kundera , The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting



We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

Milan Kundera , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting



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



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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit?

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



His love for Tereza was beautiful, but it was also tiring: he had constantly had to hide things from her, sham, dissemble, make amends, buck her up, calm her down, give her evidence of his feelings, play the defendant to her jealousy, her suffering, and her dreams, feel guilty, make excuses and apologies. Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Milan Kundera



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. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



And at some point, he realized to his great surprise that he was not particularly unhappy. Sabina's physical presence was much less important than he had suspected. What was important was the golden footprint, the magic footprint she had left on his life and no one could ever remove.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



When Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did not want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes... She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



This symmetrical compostion -- the same motif appears at the beginning and the end -- may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being





Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence...into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life...Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



… It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

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.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina What had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



The goals we pursue are always veiled.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



. . . in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



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?

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball. Yes, a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Each was riding the other like a horse, and both were galloping off into the distance of their desires, drunk on the betrayals that freed them, Franz was riding Sabina and had betrayed his wife; Sabina was riding Franz and had betrayed Franz.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Here he is, doing things he didn't care a damn about, and enjoying it. Now he understood what made people (people he always pitied) happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of an internal "Es muss sein!" and forgot it the moment they left for home every evening. This was the first time he had felt that blissful indifference. Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep. He would even lose his taste for women. The "Es muss sein!" of his profession has been like a vampire sucking his blood.

Now he roamed the streets of Prague with brush and pole, feeling ten years younger. The salesgirls all called him "doctor" (the Prague bush telegraph was working better than ever) and asked his advice about their colds, aching backs, and irregular periods. They seems almost embarrassed to watch him douse the glass with water, fit the brush on the end of the pole, and start washing. If they could have left their customers alone in the shops, they would surely have grabbed the pole from his hands and washed the windows for him.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being