Lightness Quotes:

Being free brings a lightness, a carefree surrender to all that is happening around you, and, above all, an acceptance of reality.

- Deepak Chopra

topic: Freedom, Acceptance, Reality, Lightness, Carefree

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.

- Eckhart Tolle

topic: Grace, Ease, Awakening, Lightness, Dependency

Simplify, then add lightness.

- Colin Chapman

topic: Life, Simple, Add, Lightness

We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.

- Sharon Salzberg

source: FaceBook post by Sharon Salzberg from Jul 17, 2011

topic: Ease, Care, Greater, Lightness

Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

topic: Light, Flying, Want, Lightness

Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.

- Joan Lunden

topic: Forgiveness, Hurt, Laughter, Inspirational Forgiveness, Inspirational Laughter

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

- Italo Calvino

topic: Sad, Taken, Melancholy, Lightness

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

- Milan Kundera

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

topic: Inspirational, Heart, Mind, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

- Milan Kundera

source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being pt. 3, ch. 10 (1984) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

topic: Drama, Unbearable, Burden, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

I think that the film Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness.

- Alicia Silverstone

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

topic: Funny, Clueless, Thinking, Very Stupid, Stupidest

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

- Margaret Atwood

topic: Crush, Home, Emptiness, Lightness

Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.

- Richard Serra

source: Richard Serra (1994). “Writings/Interviews”, p.185, University of Chicago Press

topic: Weight, 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.

- Milan Kundera

topic: Life, Mean, Decision, Lightness, Groundwork

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

- Milan Kundera

topic: Happiness, Laughter, Joy, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

In lightness the root is lost. In haste the ruler is lost.

- Laozi

topic: Roots, Taoism, Haste, Lightness

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

- Milan Kundera

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

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.

- Milan Kundera

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

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

- Milan Kundera

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

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

- Milan Kundera

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

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.

- Milan Kundera

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

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.

- Milan Kundera

topic: Happiness, Running, Time, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

- Milan Kundera

source: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1984.

topic: Men, Age, Body, Lightness, Love Poetry

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.

- Milan Kundera

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

topic: Giving, Birth, Realizing, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

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.

- Milan Kundera

topic: Love, Dream, Memories, Lightness, Metaphoric

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

- Arthur Erickson

topic: Artist, Japan, Europe, Lightness

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

topic: Love, Sleep, Passion, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

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

- Milan Kundera

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

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

- Milan Kundera

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

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

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

- Milan Kundera

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

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

topic: Eye, People, Dreamer, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

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.

- Milan Kundera

topic: Book, Arms, Century, Lightness, Dandy

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

- Milan Kundera

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

topic: Animal, Compassion, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Lightness, Animal Abuse

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

topic: Girl, Moving, Boys, Lightness, Unbearable Lightness

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

- Milan Kundera

topic: Plato, Philosophy, Love Is, Plato S, Lightness

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.

- Milan Kundera

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

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

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.

- Milan Kundera

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

If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.

- Steve Martin

topic: Thinking, Order, Two, Lightness, Being Overwhelmed

Simplicate and add more lightness.

- Bill Stout

topic: Add, Lightness

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

- Steve Jobs

topic: Inspirational, Success, Creativity, Stanford University, Lightness

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

- Milan Kundera

topic: Ambition, Form, Lifelong, Lightness

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

- Milan Kundera

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

topic: Love, Asking, Demand, Delivering, Lightness

I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

- Rita Mae Brown

topic: Laughter, Real, Humor, Self Destruction, Lightness

The older I get, the more I think lightness of touch is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

- Peter Capaldi

source: Source: www.avclub.com

topic: Thinking, Difficult, Things To Do, Lightness

I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

- Philip Yancey

source: Philip Yancey (1997). “What's So Amazing about Grace?”, p.41, Harper Collins

topic: Fall, Believe, Heart, Lightness, Swollen

Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.

- Pablo Picasso

topic: Reality, Darkness, Found, Lightness