Milan Kundera Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

  Milan Kundera

  Inspirational, Time, Freedom

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Friendship, Memories, Flower

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Eye, Past, Glances

• 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. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

  Milan Kundera

  Past, People, Political

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

• 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

• Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Children, Past

• 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

• And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

  Milan Kundera

  Lying, Book, Past

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Past, Thinking, Different

• The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Past, Ideas

• Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Past, Track

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

  Milan Kundera

  Past, People, Want

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

• We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Past, Realizing

• This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Real, Past

  "Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

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