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f541bd0
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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success
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Milan Kundera |
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fcc24f4
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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mind
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Milan Kundera |
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3992d8c
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Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
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sleep
polygamy
monogamy
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Milan Kundera |
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96807b0
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Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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Milan Kundera |
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bd37dc3
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for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
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empathy
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Milan Kundera |
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7d7559a
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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Milan Kundera |
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5e91e0c
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The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."
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vocabulary
nostalgia
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Milan Kundera |
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676cbcb
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The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than ai..
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Milan Kundera |
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ee91714
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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Milan Kundera |
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ef792ae
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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Milan Kundera |
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f0fcc0d
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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philosophy
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Milan Kundera |
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0a5f741
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She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say. The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express."
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Milan Kundera |
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7886877
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There is no perfection only life
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Milan Kundera |
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b03aa9e
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Milan Kundera |
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ceee087
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A single metaphor can give birth to love.
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Milan Kundera |
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55a5ac9
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Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decen..
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Milan Kundera |
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2951aae
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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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time
man
life
plight
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Milan Kundera |
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f08d837
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There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sk..
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Milan Kundera |
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a7a1ca6
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I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
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Milan Kundera |
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18a9fe3
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The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
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Milan Kundera |
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f6e1e3a
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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Milan Kundera |
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85fb435
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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Milan Kundera |
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51821c0
|
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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Milan Kundera |
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3803839
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Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
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Milan Kundera |
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dde259d
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Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
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milan-kundera
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Milan Kundera |
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655b9c1
|
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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Milan Kundera |
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e3ed06b
|
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
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violence
relationships
romance
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Milan Kundera |
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7beaca1
|
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
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Milan Kundera |
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f350c1f
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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sex
men
relationships
women
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Milan Kundera |
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8443bec
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The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
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kekuasaan
lupa
milan-kundera
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Milan Kundera |
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5f76e9e
|
Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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Milan Kundera |
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5f2576e
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I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
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youth
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Milan Kundera |
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af62972
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
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human-rights
death
euthanasia
animals
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Milan Kundera |
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ea14601
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."
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Milan Kundera |
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9192df3
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To laugh is to live profoundly.
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Milan Kundera |
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1542bd3
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
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existence
barriers
boundaries
questions
children
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Milan Kundera |
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2db2ef5
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Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
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Milan Kundera |
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ee7eac6
|
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time. Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed. If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as su..
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Milan Kundera |
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a9fffd8
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A man is responsible for his ignorance.
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man
men
resonsibility
willful-ignorance
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Milan Kundera |
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4ed44bf
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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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Milan Kundera |
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362ed00
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Milan Kundera |
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69acdf0
|
is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but s..
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suffering
truth
feeling
thinking
thought
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Milan Kundera |
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c948dce
|
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There..
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gulag
novels
utopia
|
Milan Kundera |
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b32b4a5
|
Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.
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Milan Kundera |