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e74ffaa
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Adventure, the first great theme of the novel.
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Milan Kundera |
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a03df06
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This symmetrical composition- the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end- may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive,' 'fabricated,' and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic.' Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a for..
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Milan Kundera |
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ee7b00a
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La vida humana acontece solo una vez y por eso nunca podremos averiguar cuales de nuestras decisiones fueron correctas y cuales fueron incorrectas. En la situacion dada solo hemos podido decidir una vez y no nos ha sido dada una segunda, una tercera, una cuarta vida para comparar las distintas decisiones.
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vida
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Milan Kundera |
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187f3e8
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'm byn dhr`yh fknt tGfw dy'm mhm tkn drj@ DTrbh.kn yrw~ mn 'jlh bSwt khft qSS ybtd`h 'w trht wklmt mDHk@ y`ydh bnbr@ rtyb@.knt hdhh lklmt ttHwl f~ mkhylth l~ rw'~ mshwsh@ t'khdh bh l~ lHlm l'wl.kn ymlk t'thyr khrq `l~ j`lh tGfwwknt tGfw f~ ldqyq@ lt~ yqrr hw 'n yntqyh.
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Milan Kundera |
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5e91553
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En vivant votre misere, vous pouvez etre malheureuse ou heureuse. C'est dans ce choix que consiste votre liberte. Vous etes libre de fondre votre individualite dans la marmite de la multitude avec un sentiment de defaite, ou bien avec euphorie. (...) notre seule liberte est de choisir entre l'amertume et le plaisir. L'insignifiance de tout etant notre lot, il ne faut pas la porter comme une tare, mais savoir s'en rejouir. (ch. 43)
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living
happiness
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Milan Kundera |
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511eff0
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Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?
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the-self
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Milan Kundera |
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482cc06
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llHy@ lty nkhlfh wrn `d@u lkhrwj lsyy'@ mn lZlmt, tqdym lshkyt , wfrD l'Hkm `lyn .
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Milan Kundera |
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1f89647
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Sometimes (more in sport than from real concern) I defended myself against the charge of individualism and demanded from the others proof that I was an individualist. For want of concrete evidence they would say: " It's the way you behave." "How do I behave?" "You have a strange kind of smile". "And If I do? That's how I express my joy." "No, your smile is though you were thinking to yourself."
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Milan Kundera |
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b16b307
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Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female in the world.
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Milan Kundera |
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a696dd3
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I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the non-resemblance; and that the non-resemblance was ..
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Milan Kundera |
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1190449
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But was it love? Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?
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love
self-delusion
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Milan Kundera |
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ae81476
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our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. "co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time."
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Milan Kundera |
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1055894
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tzdd jwly Hznan. w blnsb@ llrjl , l ywjd blsm ll'lm 'fDl mn lHzn ldhy ysbbh lmr'@.
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Milan Kundera |
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c51273c
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How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
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Milan Kundera |
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65144d8
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I looked at her; I saw a slipshod permanet crumpling her hair into a shapeless mass of curls; I saw a brown overcoat, pitifully threadbare and a bit too shot; I saw a face both unobtrusively attractive and attractively unobtrusive; I sensed in this young woman tranquillity, simplicity and modesty, and I felt that these were qualities I needed; moreover, it seemed to me that we were very much akin: all I had to do was to go up and start talk..
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Milan Kundera |
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26a38ec
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He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world and make friends.
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Milan Kundera |
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0d23467
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Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with all it's sums and stars. But he finds it unbearable to be condemned to lose the second infinity as well, the one so close, so nearly within reach. Tamina lost the infinity of her love, I lost my father, we all lose whatever we do, because if it is perfection we are after, we must go to the heart of the matter, and we can never quite reach it.
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Milan Kundera |
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fa8b1cc
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Tamina feels that the eyes of a single outsider are enough to destroy the worth of her personal diaries, while Goethe thinks that if a single individual fails to set eyes on his lines, that individual calls his-Goethe's-entire existence into question. The difference between Tamina and Goethe is the difference between human being and writer.
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Milan Kundera |
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d444f8e
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El hombre nunca puede saber que debe querer, porque vive solo una vida y no tiene modo de compararla con sus vidas precedentes ni de enmendarla en sus vidas posteriores.
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milan-kundera
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Milan Kundera |
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ef86726
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Love is a constant interrogation.
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Milan Kundera |
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a39edde
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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration. A face is like a name. It must have happened some time toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror..
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milan-kundera
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Milan Kundera |
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d8860dd
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and I felt happy inside these songs (...) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and solu (...), where they dance in joy...
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Milan Kundera |
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f3983a2
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In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.
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Milan Kundera |
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ee5b7f2
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Is goodwill so fragile, so precarious a thing, then? (Of course, dear fellow, of course)
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Milan Kundera |
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f47040c
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If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world.
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Milan Kundera |
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5fb8a31
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No matter what people say, life is marvelous, if you want to know who gets mu goats, it's those killjoy pessimists, even if I have plenty to complain about, you don't hear a peep out of me, what for. I ask you, what for, when life can bring me a day like today; oh, how marvelous it all is: a strange town, and me here with you...
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Milan Kundera |
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41ade8c
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Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of mans 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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Milan Kundera |
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ceb794c
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He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.
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Milan Kundera |
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46c6c56
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Nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.
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Milan Kundera |
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6cd9a36
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We can never establish with certainty which part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions--love, antipathy, charity, or malice--and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
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Milan Kundera |
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335ffc5
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In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels.
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Milan Kundera |
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03b0a74
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Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. "Beauty by mistake"- the final phase in the history of beauty."
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Milan Kundera |
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574e400
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Milan Kundera |
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60fdd97
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From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood.
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Milan Kundera |
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f279b1a
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Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individ..
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myth
history
past
czech
signs
decode
enigma
symbols
messages
forgetting
novel
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Milan Kundera |
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e18cdda
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When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we can not live or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn't en..
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Milan Kundera |
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50c3c97
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But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father." "First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most gri..
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childbirth
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Milan Kundera |
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83532c4
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He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.
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Milan Kundera |
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410bfdf
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Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the se..
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identity
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Milan Kundera |
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a4df9b6
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Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing.
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maturity
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Milan Kundera |
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dfb0aa6
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He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
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life
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Milan Kundera |
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e640293
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Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.
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Milan Kundera |
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101c80e
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What does it mean to demonstrate in the streets, what is the significance of that collective activity so symptomatic of the twentieth century? In stupefaction Ulrich watches the demonstrators from the window; as they reach the foot of the palace, their faces turn up, turn furious, the men brandish their walking sticks, but "a few steps farther, at a bend where the demonstration seemed to scatter into the wings, most of them were already dro..
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rage
politics
demonstration
spectacle
activism
modernism
artifice
protest
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Milan Kundera |
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b31c32f
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She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.
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philosophy
czech
meaning-of-life
existentialism
novel
memory
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Milan Kundera |