Milan Kundera Quotes

O lovers Be careful in those dangerous first days Once youaave brought breakfast in bed youaall have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

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A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth.

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Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

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

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I find myself fascinating.

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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

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For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question What is human existence

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Solitude a sweet absence of looks.

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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

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We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, antipathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

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A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument . . .

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We dont know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity. We merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it, as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

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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

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There are no small parts. Only small actors.

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

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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

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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.

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High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

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Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says How nice to see children running on the grass The second tear says How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

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

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

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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.

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Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

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