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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Adventure Age Ambition Art Attitude Beauty Betrayal Brotherhood Certainty Character Childhood Children Choices Coincidence Compassion Culture Darkness Desire Doubt Drama Evil Fashion Feelings Film Funny Giving Goodness Happiness Hatred Heart Home Hurt Imagination Immortality Inspirational Joy Judgment Laughter Life Love Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Morning Nostalgia Passion Past Pleasure Reality Running Sadness Sleep Soul Struggle Stupidity Suffering Today Understanding Violence War Water Writing

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

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

Happened

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

Men, Immortality, Old Man

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

Character, Meditation, Existence

The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

Play, Rivers, Next Day

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.

Attitude, Mean, Rumor

Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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

Animal, Compassion, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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

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.

Mean, People, 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.

Reality, People, Deaf

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.

Mean, Nostalgia, Quiet

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

Anger, Conflict, Intimidating

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.

Character, Borders, Possibility

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

Writing, Mean, Doe

given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love.

Dog, Couple, Men

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.

Children, Real, Believe

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.

Fall, Men, Squares

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

Possibility, Existence, Acquire

"Slowness". Book by Milan Kundera, 1995.

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

Relationship, Sex, Facts

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.

Reality, Men, Echoes

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.

Book, Unbearable, Arms

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor

Love Is, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Metaphor

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.

Inspirational, Motivational, Animal

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Dog, Animal, Law

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

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Relationship, Love Is, Violence

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

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

Noise, Advantage

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

Kitsch, Matter, Human Condition

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