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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 5

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

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

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

Happiness, Laughter, Joy

I have no mission. No one has.

Missions

Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.

Years, Long, Noise

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

Dream, Needs, Imagine

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

Beauty, Beautiful, Mean

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.

Children, Men, Knowing

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

Crazy, Love Is, Crazy Love

What I need most of all is certainty.

Needs, Certainty

Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.

Suicide, Self, Guarantees That

Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.

Beautiful, Mistake, Men

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

Love Is, Men, Emotional

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

Writing, Successful, Boys

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

Ambition, Form, Lifelong

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

Art, Logic, Source

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.

Music, Guitar, Idiocy

Laughing deeply is living deeply.

Happiness, Laughing

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.

Suffering, Glimpse, Nostalgia

"Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1997.

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

Home, Mind, Unbearable

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being". 1988.

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.

Self, Feelings, Suffering

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.

Light, Darkness, Intense

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

Tragedy, Mazes, Shells

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.

Love Is, Men, Voice

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Spiritual, Angel, Warrior

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

Art, Imagination, Modern

"Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book editing by George Plimpton, Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), 1988.

The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! 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. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Morning, Age, Unseen

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