Milan Kundera

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

The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’White Album?

The image in the mirror was instantaneously transformed: suddenly it was a woman in her undergarments, a beautiful, distant, indifferent woman with a terribly out-of-place bowler hat on her head, holding the hand of a man in a gray suit and tie.

[J]ust make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly falls away.

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

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).

If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulder.

The realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer, yet it was curiously calming as well.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

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.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player’s arm movement.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs because of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

A man able to think isn’t defeated — even when he is defeated.

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.

Laughing deeply is living deeply.

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.

To laugh is to live profoundly.

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.

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

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.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

All of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others.

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view) consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

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

The unbearable lightness of being.