Milan Kundera Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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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.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
-- Milan KunderaSource : The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 2 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)
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“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
-- Milan KunderaSource : "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.
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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
-- Milan Kundera -
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“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.”
-- Milan Kundera -
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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).”
-- Milan Kundera -
“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.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“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 sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.”
-- Milan Kundera -
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“He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.”
-- Milan Kundera -
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“Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“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 -
“And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.”
-- Milan Kundera -
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“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“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. 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.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“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.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.”
-- Milan Kundera -
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“Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”
-- Milan Kundera -
“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.”
-- Milan Kundera
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