Milan Kundera Quotes

The moment rules over everything.

The present will not long endure.

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

The pictures remind you of something that can never be recaptured, the time is gone, the only thing you know is the present. That's all that's knowable and even the present isn't knowable. The present becomes the past... so you really don't know anything.

Time stays, we go.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Time destroys everything.

Time is not kind to everything.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

The industry's memory is quite short, it's true.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

TV happens. And once it's happened, it's gone. When it's gone, you move on, no tears, no tantrums, no videotape.

The temporal quality of all things was being firmly impressed upon me.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Time is the devourer of all things.

It's a moment that I'm after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.

How terrible a thing time is.

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Time is undefeated.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

You can't halt time.

Nothing grows old faster than the new.