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f83cf3b
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In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood
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Milan Kundera |
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5d3eb1f
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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Milan Kundera |
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8483c3d
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Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."
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Milan Kundera |
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e43560c
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The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
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nature
humanity
life
philosophy
nurture
roots
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Milan Kundera |
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8cc437d
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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Milan Kundera |
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603bddd
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W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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past
memory
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Milan Kundera |
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5d0b28f
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We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
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Milan Kundera |
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26ecf35
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To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
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Milan Kundera |
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4ce37c8
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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Milan Kundera |
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ecd19f5
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But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously the 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,..
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Milan Kundera |
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cd46628
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because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.
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lovers
life
love
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Milan Kundera |
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6d8208a
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It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76" --
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weakness
helplessness
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Milan Kundera |
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7fcc545
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Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
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death
wandering
moving
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Milan Kundera |
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ec38e62
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When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.
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wisdom
tolerance
mystery
novel
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Milan Kundera |
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0d30653
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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Milan Kundera |
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5898ec2
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It is completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; She did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor has she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anybody 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 lo..
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Milan Kundera |
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e745040
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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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time
speed
memory
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Milan Kundera |
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c4ff6f8
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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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Milan Kundera |
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f6f3eb6
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
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Milan Kundera |
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166cca1
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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
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Milan Kundera |
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e5e9659
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A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exis..
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Milan Kundera |
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8e82201
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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love
hysteria
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Milan Kundera |
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14af7c7
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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Milan Kundera |
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f8b7c92
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Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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living
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Milan Kundera |
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1ce90f1
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Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories w..
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meaning
stories
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Milan Kundera |
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c0ac287
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We can never establish with certainty what 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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a5647f7
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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Milan Kundera |
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55e60a4
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Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten.
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Milan Kundera |
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5e26872
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Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could ..
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totalitarianism
paradise
utopia
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Milan Kundera |
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ba2a30f
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She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It differentiated her from the others
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Milan Kundera |
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c2a6ea7
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The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
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Milan Kundera |
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33e42a3
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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Milan Kundera |
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9776d72
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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music
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Milan Kundera |
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257ecb2
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Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.
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Milan Kundera |
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3065dae
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l`awd l'bdy, fkr@ yktnfh lGmwD wbh 'rbk nytshh lkthyryn mn lflsf@: 'n ntSwr 'n kl shy' sytkrr dht ywm km `shnh fy lsbq, w'n hdh ltkrr bldht sytkrr bl nhy@! mdh t`ny hdhh lkhrf@ lmjnwn@? ==================== tw'kd khrf@ l`awd l'bdy, slb, 'n lHy@ lty tkhtfy nhy'yan, wlty l trj` nm hy 'shbh bZl wdwn wzn wmyt@ slfan, wmhm tkn hdhh lHy@ fZy`@ 'w jmyl@ w ry'`@ fn hdhh lfZ`@ whdh ljml whdhh lrw`@ l t`ny shyy'an, hy Gyr dht 'hmy@ mthl Hrb wq`t byn ..
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Milan Kundera |
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7b88338
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It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.
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meaningless
forgetting
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Milan Kundera |
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5ef5ddb
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Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the ..
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Milan Kundera |
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b681436
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This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment--beyo..
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Milan Kundera |
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a9e5707
|
But deep down she said to herself, Franz maybe strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he's loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give orders. There are thin..
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Milan Kundera |
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3759da6
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Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redr..
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sacrifice
mothers
guilt
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Milan Kundera |
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85c405e
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lky'n lnsn~ lys l sh`wran blwHd@.
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Milan Kundera |
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ab0bb6e
|
You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
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Milan Kundera |
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b988246
|
Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or..
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Milan Kundera |
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56893c4
|
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
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imagination
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Milan Kundera |