Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 12

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• Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.

  Milan Kundera

  Morality, Judgment, Novel

  "Testaments Betrayed". Book by Milan Kundera, 1995.

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• People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, People, Fellow Man

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• Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

  Milan Kundera

  Passion, Together, Apathy

  "Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

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• Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.

  Milan Kundera

  Talent, Disgusting, Oneself

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• Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

  Milan Kundera

  Past, Different, Looks

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• I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

  Milan Kundera

  Real, Hypocrite, Faces

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

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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!

  Milan Kundera

  Running, Children, Nice

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

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• The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

  Milan Kundera

  Thinking, Ideas, Mad

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• Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

  Milan Kundera

  Discovery, Criticism, Critics

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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.

  Milan Kundera

  Ideas, Hammers, Tools

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• Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Flower, Past

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• Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.

  Milan Kundera

  Running, Men, Thinking

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• In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Age, Body

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1984.

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• And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.

  Milan Kundera

  Fall, Heart, Sight

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• When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

  Milan Kundera

  Differences, Doe, Stones

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• We don't 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Funny, Humorous, Inspiration

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• [Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

  Milan Kundera

  Jobs, Epic, Men

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• what's the matter?" he asked "nothing" "what do you want me to do for you?" "i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older" what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.

  Milan Kundera

  Years, Twenties, Want

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• The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.

  Milan Kundera

  Eye, Identity, Persons

  "Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

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• Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Use, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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

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• Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Want, Revolution

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• Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.

  Milan Kundera

  Europe, Important, Toil

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• She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say. The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.

  Milan Kundera

  Strong, Overwhelming Desire, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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

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• But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

  Milan Kundera

  Passion, Men, Tests

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

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• The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.
  Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

  Milan Kundera

  Understanding, Age, Too Late

  "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". Book by Milan Kundera, 1979.

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