Milan Kundera Quotes

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

I think love has something to do with allowing a person you claim to love to enter a larger arena than the one you create for them.

When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.

She clenched her fist in his T-shirt, put her other arm around those too-broad, too-real shoulders. When he tried to pull away, she held on tight. Kami felt the surrender in his mind a moment before he laid his face in the curve of her neck. The whole world was so real it hurt. Kami whispered into Jared's hair, "I'm always on your side.

People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much.

Oh, the miraculous energy that flows between two people who care enough to get beyond surfaces and games, who are willing to take the risks of being totally open, of listening, of responding with the whole heart. How much we can do for each other.

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

I don't think love is a tricky issue at all. Love is best understood when we share: Share time, energy, food, resources, insights, information, whatever. It's usually thought of as something that exists between two people, but that's just because it's easier to see and feel in the space between them. Each person is sharing a lot with the other.

I fell in love for the right reason. I fell in love unconditionally.

The only kind of love worth having is the kind that goes on living and laughing and fighting and loving.

Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It's the magic sauce.

Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.

There is nothing you can control about love.

Knowing is the most profound kind of love, giving someone the gift of knowledge about yourself.

I love my husband very much. I knew it was real true love because I felt like I could be myself around that person. Your true, true innermost authentic self, the stuff you don't let anyone else see, if you can be that way with that person, I think that that's real love.

Real love and intimacy can be much more possible when you're older.

The only way to real mature love is to get past the tropes of what we consider 'romance.'

We tend to lack humility toward love, to patronize it rather than bow before it, to put mundane considerations before the emotional need to hold someone in our arms.

I think the thing about love is that even though the things around us change, we as human beings, a lot of the ways we interact, and the ways we love each other is timeless. It requires trust, honesty, commitment, romance, and physical chemistry.

Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.

To me, love means being free of your own bondage and connecting to another soul.

I think love isn't doomed, of course, but in real life, love doesn't always work out.

The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

Being in love is all about the ability to give rather than take. It is not easy, but if you can accept this, then you will experience love.

Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.