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71dbc14
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Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.
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Milan Kundera |
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1e5f837
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beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.
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Milan Kundera |
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8898c64
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By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if ..
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empathy
love
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Milan Kundera |
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3d1587b
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The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice. But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
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love
body
soul
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Milan Kundera |
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b0bc22f
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Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.
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Milan Kundera |
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5812825
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Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. 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 refr..
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Milan Kundera |
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95fdef2
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This symmetrical composition--the same motif 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."
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Milan Kundera |
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fab61cd
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br hrchh sngyntr bshd, zndgy m bh zmyn nzdykhtr, wq`ytr w Hqyqytr st.
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Milan Kundera |
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5f96054
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to love someone out of compassion means not really to love
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Milan Kundera |
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8dc08ec
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People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.
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life
perspective
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Milan Kundera |
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d4391a8
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But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.
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Milan Kundera |
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f1c676e
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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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Milan Kundera |
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31bfe15
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The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and foul and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a..
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Milan Kundera |
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8bcd494
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he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
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Milan Kundera |
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2c4afe7
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Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.
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Milan Kundera |
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caea4b4
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There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
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Milan Kundera |
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2da617a
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The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.
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Milan Kundera |
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69e5cc1
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If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.
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Milan Kundera |
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379a540
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The churches failed to realize that the working-class movement was the movement of the humiliated and oppressed supplicating for justice. They did not choose to work with and for them to create the kingdom of God on earth. By siding with the oppressors, they deprived the working-class movement of God. And now they reproach it for being godless. The Pharisees!
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Milan Kundera |
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feceecf
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The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry. ... Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be 'beauty by mistake.
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Milan Kundera |
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bec1c72
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Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
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Milan Kundera |
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770a637
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Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.
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life
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Milan Kundera |
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e011253
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By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors."
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Milan Kundera |
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9425925
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The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
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Milan Kundera |
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194e79c
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dh ystTy` jyshn kbyrn 'n ytSr` Ht~ lmwt mn 'jl qDy mqds@, lkn bktyry SGyr@ wntn@ tqDy dy'm `l~ lthnyn.
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Milan Kundera |
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53fc593
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Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is a dangerous as the situation in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.
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Milan Kundera |
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16cb9ad
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El hombre nunca sabe que debe querer porque vive solo una vida y no tiene modo de compararla con sus vidas precedentes ni de enmendarla con sus vidas posteriores.
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Milan Kundera |
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9ba50a0
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All the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. Drink it to the dregs. No cheating allowed. No making believe it's not there. Modern man cheats. He tries to get around all the milestones on the road from birth to death.
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Milan Kundera |
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a9934d9
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Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.
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Milan Kundera |
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3e9d771
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Hacer el amor con una mujer y dormir con una mujer son dos pasiones no solo distintas sino casi contradictorias. El amor no se manifiesta en el deseo de acostarse con alguien (este deseo se produce en relacion con una cantidad innumerable de mujeres), sino en el deseo de dormir junto a alguien (este deseo se produce en relacion con una unica mujer).
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sexo
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Milan Kundera |
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5a426c4
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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
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reality
unimaginable
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Milan Kundera |
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e39b1c6
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All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.
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Milan Kundera |
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aa91089
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gr blndprwzy ndshth bshy w tshnh mwfq shdn w bh rsmyt shnkhth shdn nbshy dr astnh sqwT qrr mygyry
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Milan Kundera |
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0a0ac7f
|
dhlk 'n shGf lm`rf@ `nd lrwy'y l ysthdf lsys@ wl ltrykh. m ljdyd ldhy bmkn rwy'y 'n yktshfh Hwl l'Hdth lmwSwf@ wlmnqsh@ fy alf lktb lrSyn@ lmtnw`@?
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Milan Kundera |
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5a0d312
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There was nothing to be done. From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood tha Lucie cared for it; perhaps her tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence, made her think of flowers as a form of speech; not in the sense of heavy-handed conventional flower symbolism, but in a sense still more archaic, more nebulous, more ins..
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Milan Kundera |
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8dc5372
|
klm knt Hytn thql Hmlan knt Hytn qrb l~ l'rD wknt wq`y@ 'kthr wHqyqy@ 'kthr
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Milan Kundera |
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16b055c
|
In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head, and says: "I know just what you mean."
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Milan Kundera |
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8cb8de2
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She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.
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Milan Kundera |
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adb9050
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His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession...He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.
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Milan Kundera |
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5a28424
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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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0e24604
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Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more l..
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jealousy
love
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Milan Kundera |
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dff21d5
|
Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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Milan Kundera |
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1d2bb2c
|
Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgement on us, of course. And without any competence.
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Milan Kundera |
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91d08c0
|
ndm 'sm` sm twlstwy, 'tSwr `l~ lfwr rwytyh l`Zymtyn lty l yshbhhm shy. w`ndm 'nTq 'sm srtr wkmw wmlrw, fn m tthyrh fy shkhSythm hw syrhm wjdlthm wm`rkhm wmwqfhm.
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Milan Kundera |