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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 2

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Happiness, Laughter, Joy

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

Intelligent, Thinking, Intellectual

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.

Maturity, Mind, Favors

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

Intelligent, Finding Yourself, Born

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

A man is responsible for his ignorance.

Ignorance, Men, Responsible

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

Love Is, Ends, True Love Is

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.

Lying, Secret, Borders

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

Unhappy Person, Unbearable, Life Is

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

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.

Decision, Granted, Reason

There is no perfection only life

Perfection

Sad company is bad company.

Bad Company, Company

"The Farewell Waltz". Book by Milan Kundera, 1972.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Optimistic, Optimism, People

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

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

Past, People, Want

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

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.

Country, Mean, Childhood

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

Strength, Memories, Struggle

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

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.

Dream, Communication, Games

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

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

Men, Thinking, Able

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?

Men, Hatred, Certain

To laugh is to live profoundly.

Laughing, Chaos

a man possessed with peace is always smiling

Men, Always Smile, Possessed

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.

Eye, People, Dreamer

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

Love Is, Definitions, Definition Of Love

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.

Eye, Past, Glances

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 usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.

Horse, Men, Order

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1884.

Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?

Funny, Beer, Hypocrisy

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