10 Unforgettable Thoughts From Milan Kundera
All quotes from Milan Kundera are works of art. Most of them are part of his awesome and extensive collection of literary works. His novels not only contain beautiful plots, but also an in-depth reflection on the world and modern man.
Milan Kundera was born in 1929. He moved to France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981. Although he lived far from his homeland in his later years, much of his work is about life in Czechoslovakia.
Milan Kundera’s texts feature an intelligent writer who had the ability to delve into the labyrinth of the human subconscious. If for years people have been waiting for him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature due to the quality of his work.
In this article, we present an interesting (albeit incomplete) collection of some of his best ideas.
One of Milan Kundera’s most memorable quotes
This thinker is not only a great novelist; he has also proved to be the great philosopher of our time. His view of the world is deeply realistic and at the same time very touching. One of his strengths is the ability to capture the motivation of the subconscious. This is exactly what most of his quotes reflect – a deep understanding of people. This idea is reflected in this interesting excerpt about our obsession with order:
Power and the world
Almost all of Kundera’s work deals with the subject of power. He is very critical of power and its morals. For example, when writing this quote,
Kundera lived under the strict rule of the Soviet Union. The restrictions imposed by the administration on thinking and expression had a significant effect on him. One of Milan Kundera’s ideas is:
He is right. The secret as to what power wants to cherish lies in the things it denies.
The same is true of this quote: “Man’s struggle against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion.” Power causes evil and malice in people. Every character in power tries to believe that it all starts with him. But so often history simply repeats itself. Memory is the only thing that breaks the spiral.
Love and fear
Love is one of the themes present in the works of this author. In the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he associates it with a lucky coincidence. In this work he writes:
Many of Milan Kundera’s quotes also deal with indifference and oblivion. For example, this following quote from the same book speaks on the subject in a beautiful poetic way:
When someone or something is no longer with you, reality is obscured by an imaginative and magical veil.
Fear and other things
Anxiety is mostly caused by what has not yet happened. The possibility that it will happen attracts fear into our lives. The truth is that we tend to fear more of the products of our imagination than real life.
We always experience difference, difference, strangeness in the world. According to Kundera, we never get to know why we annoy other people or what makes us kind or ridiculous. Our self-image is our greatest mystery .
Understanding and fragility
Many of Kundera’s texts speak of fragility and compassion. In fact, animals have priority in his writings, as much for the reason of what they are as for the reason of what they represent.
Compassion among people also means suffering. According to Kundera, there is nothing heavier than compassion. Even a person’s own pain is not as heavy as the pain he feels for someone else. It is a pain that the imagination intensifies. In other words, sometimes it concerns more to look at the suffering of a loved one than to suffer for oneself.
These ideas of Kundera are only a small part of his great works. He is not in vain one of the most admired contemporary writers in the world. He, unlike many other writers, managed to capture contemporary features and then expressed them in a beautiful and amazing way in his books.
