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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 389e3cd | I believe that in matters of the heart there is no such thing as compromise. Love means that you give each other everything. | love romance romantic-love trust | Milan Kundera | |
| 72cbe82 | Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it. (If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)" | farther forward near-end progress | Milan Kundera | |
| 467b11d | she thought that after what she had been through during the invasion she would stop being petty and grow up, grow wise and strong, but she had overestimated herself | Milan Kundera | ||
| ee3a106 | Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 52161a0 | But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel? | Milan Kundera | ||
| 8641e47 | You know, it's really very peculiar. 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. | dying immortality life living mortality philosophy | Milan Kundera | |
| b1bdedc | Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 0a7d434 | lwf hw fDyl@ lfDy'l , flwf yj`l Hytn mtmsk@ , wlwlh lknt tb`thrt l~ alf lnTb`t l`br@. | Milan Kundera | ||
| b4f8175 | You seem to be turning into the theme of all my paintings", she said. "The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or, the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine." | Milan Kundera | ||
| ef3d807 | political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 60b88a6 | wqty frd qwy anqdr D`yf myshwd khh bh frd D`yf byHrmty mykhnd, frd D`yf byd bhrsty khwd r qwy bdnd. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 725969c | Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless." | epistemology existentialism modernism tolstoy | Milan Kundera | |
| 4cc17b5 | the thought went through his mind that beauty is a spark which flares up when two ages meet across the distance of time, that beauty is a clean sweep of chronology, a rebellion against time. | time | Milan Kundera | |
| efe61e5 | Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 69f8b4f | It's a vicious circle, people are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they're going deaf it has to be played louder still. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 80d1772 | 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. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 284ddda | 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. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being --was that the goal? | future heaviness potential unbearable-lightness unknown veiled | Milan Kundera | |
| 54f4ee3 | What remains of Beethoven? A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning "Es muss seine!" ....And so n and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into Kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion." | Milan Kundera | ||
| 6cd074b | Misery and pride. 'On horseback, death and a peacock'. | Milan Kundera | ||
| d04d224 | Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. | Milan Kundera | ||
| f19dda9 | But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool? | Milan Kundera | ||
| 5788b02 | Love begins with a metaphor. Love begins at a point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 3cd3475 | 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 if 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. | Milan Kundera | ||
| e0c63a7 | Orwell's 1984 [...] is political thought disguised as a novel; the thinking is certainly lucid and correct, but it is distorted by its guise as a novel, which renders it imprecise and vague. [...] the situations and the characters are as flat as a poster. The pernicious influence of Orwell's novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily.. | propaganda totalitarism | Milan Kundera | |
| 5dca389 | What is unbearable in life is not being, but being one's self. To live, there is no happiness there. Living: carrying around the world one's painful self. But being, being is happiness. Being: to transform into a fountain, a stone basin in which the universe descends like a lukewarm rain - Postface by Francois Ricard, translated from French | Milan Kundera | ||
| 8bcee8b | It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape. | Milan Kundera | ||
| cd09b69 | It was only an idea, a sudden flash, but it kept coming back to me, and I couldn't help thinking, why am I alive, what good is there in going on, but it's not true really, I didn't think anything of the sort, I was hardly thinking at all, I just imagined myself no longer alive and suddenly I felt such bliss, such strange bliss that I wanted to laugh and maybe really did begin to laugh. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 1962625 | The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time? | Milan Kundera | ||
| 871307b | And do you know the story about Haydn's head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He'd carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master's gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the ca.. | privacy | Milan Kundera | |
| 3127ca8 | The episode of Banaka pointing to his chest and crying out of existential anguish reminds me of a line from Goethe's West-East Divan: "Is one man alive when others are alive?" Deep within Goethe's query lies the secret of the writer's creed. By writing books, the individual becomes a universe (we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka, do we not?). And since the principal quality of a universe is its.. | Milan Kundera | ||
| dd2164a | Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out.. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 2b72eee | That idea would be embarrassing because there is something excessive about it, it would take to much energy to defend (while the best possible progressive idea, so to speak, defends itself)... | Milan Kundera | ||
| 6fc7fab | The man of fantasy must become the man of action, the adventure of dreams the adventure of life. | Milan Kundera | ||
| b06b2cd | A person finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own. | Milan Kundera | ||
| f51e913 | Encouraged by her parents' applause, the girl went on: "Do you think we take off our tops to give you pleasure? We do it for ourselves, because we like it, because it feels better, because it brings our bodies nearer to the sun! You're only capable of seeing us as sex objects!" Again Papa and Mama Clevis applauded, but this time their bravos had a somewhat different tone. Their daughter's words were indeed right, but also somewhat inappropr.. | objectification progressivism sexuality | Milan Kundera | |
| 1920e08 | How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him? | Milan Kundera | ||
| f6ea485 | The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have cirumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the tra.. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 0b32902 | I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist. | Milan Kundera | ||
| b786ae5 | In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted | Milan Kundera | ||
| 3c4713e | We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come | Milan Kundera | ||
| 48802a5 | he could not quite understand what had happened. he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them | Milan Kundera | ||
| dd01342 | He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. | memory nostalgia | Milan Kundera | |
| 00e4422 | The crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death. | Milan Kundera | ||
| f0705b8 | all languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" | Milan Kundera |