Milan Kundera Quotes:

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Topics: Mean, Greek, Suffering

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.

Topics: Dream, Communication, Games, Unbearable Lightness, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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.

Topics: Love, Nature, Peace, Debacles, Compassion Towards Animals

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.

source: - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 2 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

Topics: Memories, Struggle, Book, Power Struggle, New Cultures

You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

Topics: Love, Two, Numbers, Unbearable Lightness

Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

Topics: Loyalty, Lasts, Virtue

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

source: - "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

Topics: Inspirational, Heart, Mind, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Topics: Strength, Memories, Struggle

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

Topics: Attitude, Animal, Humanity, Animal Cruelty, Animal Testing

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Topics: Love Is, Half, Longing, Lightness, Symposium

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.

Topics: Life, Understanding, Age

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Topics: Dance

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).

Topics: Love, Sleep, Passion, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

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.

Topics: Girl, Moving, Boys, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

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.

Topics: Life, Mean, Decision, Lightness, Groundwork

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

Topics: Knowing, Giving, Emotion

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Topics: Conflict, Intimidating, Resolution, Subordinates

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

Topics: Laughter, Domes, Temples, Humour And Laughter, Sound Doctrine

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.

Topics: Writing, Ambition, Creative, Predecessors

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

Topics: Motivation, Inspiration, Ideas

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.

Topics: Love Is, Bird, Magic, Unforgettable

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.

Topics: Fall, Men, Squares, Vertigo, Unbearable Lightness

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.

Topics: Fall, Heart, Sight, Wreaths

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.

Topics: Men, Mysterious, Coincidence, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Topics: Sunset, Auras, Nostalgia, Everything Is Illuminated, Lightness

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.

Topics: Horse, Men, Order, Sanctify

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.

Topics: Dazzle, Unbearable, Purpose, Unforgettable

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

Topics: Men, Sad Life, Gentleman

Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Topics: Serious

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.

Topics: Eye, People, Dreamer, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

Topics: Men, Games, Naked

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.

Topics: Thinking, Mind, World

To laugh is to live profoundly.

Topics: Laughing, Chaos

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Topics: Lying, Chaos, Surface, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

Topics: Lying, Secret, Littles, Miles Away

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

Topics: Unhappy, Life Is, Persons, Lightness, Unhappy Person

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

Topics: Want, Unseen, Disappear, Incomprehension

Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.

Topics: Strong, Two, Light

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 redress.

Topics: Daughter, Mother, Children, Great Sacrifice, Sacrificing Everything

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

Topics: Men, Paradise, Longing

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Topics: Life, Might, Adages

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.

Topics: Children, Love You, Thinking, I Don't Love You

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

Topics: Mean, Wine, Bottles, Bottles Of Wine

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

source: - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 17 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

Topics: Past, People, Political, Apathetic, Better Future

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

Topics: Mean, Writing, Doe

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Topics: Reality, People, Deaf

My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.

Topics: Ambition, Form, Lifelong, Lightness

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

Topics: Effort, Argument, Justify

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Topics: Art, Imagination, Modern, Modern Art

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Topics: Kitsch, Matter, Human Condition

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

Topics: Warning, Actors, Cold

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Topics: Novelists, Historic, Given

Optimism is the opium of the people.

source: - Milan Kundera (1983). “The Joke”, Viking Press

Topics: Optimism, People, Opium

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Topics: Happiness, Laughter, Joy, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Topics: Bisexual, Novel, Great Novels

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Topics: Hate, Human Nature, Traps, Binding

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

source: - "Siraaj: An Arab Tale". Book by Radwa Ashour and Barbara Romaine, 2007.

Topics: People, Stupidity, Answers, People Stupidity

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Topics: Love, Dream, Memories, Lightness, Metaphoric

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

Topics: Lying, People, Ability

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

Topics: Cutting, Past, Men, Fear None, Ultimate Freedom

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 ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Topics: Beautiful, Memories, Brain, Lightness, Unbearable Things

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Topics: Memories, Degrees, Forget, Slowness

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more

Topics: Suffering, Glimpse, Nostalgia

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.

Topics: Sadness, Space, Together

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Topics: Age, Moments, Certain, Ageless

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 our hatred?

Topics: Men, Hatred, Certain, Concurrence

Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.

Topics: Dream, Needs, Imagine

Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.

Topics: Relationship, Sex, Facts

loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

Topics: Ideas, Empires, Lightness, Fade Away, Unbearable Lightness

...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.

Topics: Feelings, Way, Action

I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

Topics: Thinking, Intelligent, Intellectual, Toothache

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Topics: Character, Thinking, People

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

Topics: Humility, Together, Delight, Exaggeration Is

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

Topics: Children, Answers, Limits, Naive

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

Topics: Messages, Chance, Speak, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Topics: Hurt, Strong, Enough, Unbearable Lightness, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

Topics: Writing

The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.

Topics: Feelings, Doe, Elements

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

Topics: Voice, Return, Calling

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised 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 circumvented.

Topics: Character, Borders, Possibility

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

source: - "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Jealousy, Dog, Evil, I Love My Dog, Labrador Dogs

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Topics: Historical, Criticism, Gestures

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Topics: Pleasure, Ambiguity

Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

Topics: Betrayal, Forever, Breakfast, Lovelessness, Breakfast In Bed

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Topics: Art, Imagination, People, Decipher, Carried Away

The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.

Topics: Drama, Serious, Form, Serious Subjects, Frivolous

And therein lies the whole of man's 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.

Topics: Happiness, Running, Time, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.

Topics: Real, Animal, Tests

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

Topics: Want, Weak, I Want You

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

Topics: Love, Beautiful, Two, Alone In Love, Unbearable Lightness

Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved

Topics: Book, Knowing, Conviction

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.

Topics: Animal, Paradise, Idyllic

To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

Topics: Friendship, Memories, Flower

A man is responsible for his ignorance.

Topics: Ignorance, Men, Responsible, Willful Ignorance

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Topics: Memories, Doe, Film

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

source: - "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Letting Go, Dog, Stress, Bulldogs, Inspirational Dog

There is no perfection only life

Topics: Perfection

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Topics: Pain, Compassion, Imagination, Lightness, Unbearable Things

she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

Topics: Book, Arms, Century, Lightness, Dandy

La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

Topics: Wall, Dirty, Ideas

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.

Topics: Attitude, People, Stupidity

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Topics: Success, Fall, Voice, Lightness, Unbearable Things

It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.

Topics: Maturity, Mind, Favors, Closed Mind, Open Mindedness

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

Topics: Dream, Reflection, Mirrors

She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women

Topics: Mother, Unique, World

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

Topics: Decision, Granted, Reason

But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?

Topics: Men, Gone, Masters

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.

Topics: Gains, Weight, Burden

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

Topics: Intelligent, Littles, Novel, Great Novels

She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome and good-but the more she thought about it, the more she longed to ravish his intelligence, defile his kindheartedness, and violate his powerless strength

Topics: Intelligent, Men, Handsome

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Topics: Kitsch, Forgotten, Oblivion

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

Topics: Kissing, Avid, Taste

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! 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?

Topics: Men, Hysteria, Self, Exaggerated, Unbearable Lightness

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

source: - "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

Topics: Giving, Birth, Realizing, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.

Topics: Mean, Past, Ideas, Modern Times

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

Topics: Art, Logic, Arise

Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)

Topics: Artist, World, Paper

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Topics: Art, Mean, Passion, Extremism, Longing For Death

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time..

Topics: Tombstone, Flower, Garden, Greenery, Bohemia

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

Topics: Love Is, Men, Voice, Unbearable Lightness

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

Topics: Reality, Men, Echoes, Approving

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

Topics: Crazy, Love Is, Crazy Love

Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.

Topics: Fall, Believe, Sleep

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es Muss sein!

Topics: Lying, Love Is, Use, Love Freedom, Mechanism

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas

Topics: Mean, Ignorance, Ideas

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Topics: Men, Forget, Immortality

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

Topics: Flirting, Promise, Guarantees, Unbearable Lightness

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

Topics: Heart, Feelings, Mind

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

Topics: Men, Immortality, Old Man

Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

Topics: Weight, Three, Heavy

Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.

Topics: Love Is, Desire, Half

At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

Topics: Love Is, Ends, True Love Is

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

Topics: Choices, Unhappy, Desolation

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Topics: Possibility, Existence, New Possibilities

Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.

Topics: Europe, Important, Fruit, Translators

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

Topics: Morning, Moving, Adventure, Glisten, Morning Dew

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?

Topics: Children, Sight, Soul

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 into the dying day.

Topics: Wise, Daughter, Mother, Loving Mother

Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

Topics: Children, Moving, Infancy

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late. 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.

Topics: Understanding, Age, Too Late, Unheard, Before It's Too Late

The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.

Topics: Childhood, Path, Steps

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Topics: Past, People, Want

In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Topics: Home, Mind, Unbearable, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.

Topics: Cutting, Tests, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

Topics: Hurt, Book, Men

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

Topics: Lying, Mean, Doe

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Topics: Art, Strong, Mean, Longing For Death, Distaste

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor . . .

Topics: Children, Race, Generations, Perversion, Relay Races

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.

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Relationship, Power Play, Antipathy

For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.

Topics: Essence, Flames, Body

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

Topics: Lying, Want, Madmen

Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.

Topics: Marriage, Sex, Thinking

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

Topics: Soul, Body, Betrayed

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.

Topics: Believe, Doe, Adults

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

Topics: Running, Children, Nice, Unbearable Lightness, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.

Topics: Hard Times, Faces, Sincere, Reminding Yourself

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

Topics: Order, Longing, Life Is, Disruption, Longing For Death

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Topics: Mean, Writing, People, Musical Composition, Bowler Hats

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Topics: Character, Meditation, Existence

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

Topics: Years, Knowing, Decision, Make Up Your Mind

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

Topics: Reason, Fragments, Existence, Literary Works

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

Topics: Men, Parody

Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

Topics: Mean, Use, Love Means, Unbearable Lightness

The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So, during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes focused on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

Topics: Mother, Hurt, Mistake

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Topics: Eye, Past, Glances, Blindfolded

To put it another way, every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

Topics: Dream, Party, Hands, Fine Print, Breakfast In Bed

But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.

Topics: Mean, People, Useless

She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.

Topics: Body, Passionate, Surface

Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.

Topics: Player, Games, Traps

Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.

Topics: Women, Events, Action, Ability To Change

There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to the very last, the most important one, at this point a man must halt and stand firm if he doesn't want to begin life all over again with idle hands and a feeling of being shipwrecked.

Topics: Men, Hands, Order, Idle Hands, Stand Firm

Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.

Topics: Attitude, Mean, Rumor, Immaculate Conception

If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him.

Topics: Mets, Fallen

But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

Topics: Dream, Betrayal, Agreement, Lovelessness, Uncompromising

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

Topics: Country, Mean, Childhood, Foreign Countries

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 things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Topics: Strong, Love Is, Mirrors, Deep Down, Unbearable Lightness

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

Topics: Talking, Two, People, Discreet

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

Topics: Firsts, Rehearsal, Life Is

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

Topics: People, Liberty, World, Unfree

I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.

Topics: Dirty, Wine, People

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

Topics: Inspirational, Funny, Ambition, Early Bird, My Ambition

Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

Topics: Love Is, Definitions, Definition Of Love, Interrogation

Beauty is a rebellion against time.

Topics: Rebellion

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Topics: Lying, Worry, Anxiety

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.

Topics: Memories, Lying, Believe, Rectification

Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.

source: - "Farewell Waltz: A Novel". Book by Milan Kundera, 1976.

Topics: Beautiful, Crazy, Believe, Crazy Ideas

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.

Topics: Men, Able, Accepting

Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.

source: - "Farewell Waltz: A Novel". Book by Milan Kundera, 1976.

Topics: Intelligent, Finding Yourself, Born

Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

Topics: Eye, Infinity, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

Topics: Lying, Sadness, Elude Us, Swarms

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

source: - "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

Topics: Answers, Kitsch, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Unbearable Lightness

A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.

Topics: Men, Thinking, Able

Sad company is bad company.

source: - "The Farewell Waltz". Book by Milan Kundera, 1972.

Topics: Bad Company, Company

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.

Topics: Rain, Fall, Self

War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

source: - "Immortality". Book by Milan Kundera, 1990.

Topics: War, Fighting, Years

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

Topics: New York, Independent, Design, Caverns

The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Topics: Real, Men, Air, Unbearable Lightness, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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.

Topics: Perfect, Want, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Previous Life, Unbearable Lightness