Milan Kundera

Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

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

Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.

La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor

This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.

The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.