Milan Kundera Quotes

I tried to think about these two issues very freely. With sex, I think I can manage with that. With death, this is a more difficult theme for me. I'm not a believer, even though I'm baptized. I don't practice. I don't believe in God, so I feel very alone facing death. What I discovered is that the only way to recognize death is if you are part of life, if you are part of sexual pleasure, if you link it with sexual pleasure.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

I think a lot about death more than life, because we're going towards death.

Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

The eunuch had looked death in the face, so near he might have kissed her on the lips.

There are two things which Man cannot look at directly without flinching: the sun and death.

To me death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's cursed.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

One is born, one lives, one dies. What death is, I don't know.

I think all people are familiar with thinking about their death and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will, at some point, no longer exist. The loss of one's ego is very tough to reconcile with; you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap your head around the idea of just not existing anymore.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.