Milan Kundera Quotes

In the life of one man, never The same time returns.

Life is once. Forever.

Time is flying never to return.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

I realized - and I am probably the last person in the world to realize this - that we live our lives with no editing.

Time hurries by, we're here and gone.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.

I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and fatal, that there never would be a return, another time.

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

And what is Life? - An hour-glass on the run