Milan Kundera Quotes

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.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Art is made in hindsight.

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

Ignorance is bliss, or so we're told. Personally, I find ignorance is also destiny.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

This taught me a lesson, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

He who closes his eyes sees nothing, even in the full light of day.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.