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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 4

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

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

Looks, Plunge, Young

The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

Crazy, Book, Writing

Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.

Catholic, Prague, Empires

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

Writing

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

Goal, Suffering, Unbearable

Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

War, Mean, Men

Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.

Sex, Ideas, Bizarre

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.

Dream, Betrayal, Drawing

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

Pain, Compassion, Imagination

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

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 at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Beautiful, Memories, Brain

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

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

Men, Paradise, Longing

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

Memories, Secret, Forget

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

Past, Thinking, Different

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.

Purpose, Dazzle, Unbearable

Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.

Love Is, Desire, Half

Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.

Song, Baby, Sleep

"Fictional character: Tomas". "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", www.imdb.com. February 5, 1988.

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.

Attitude, People, Stupidity

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

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

Reason, Fragments, Existence

Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable

Pain, Reason, Reasonable

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

Memories, Degrees, Forget

...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.

Feelings, Way, Action

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.

People, Want, Void

"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". Book by Milan Kundera, 1980.

No love can survive muteness.

No Love

"Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

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.

Hard Times, Faces, Sincere

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

Cat, Unique, Self

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