Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 13

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There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Milan Kundera

Philosophy, Problem, Metaphysical

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Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

Milan Kundera

Unbearable, Metaphor, Dangerous

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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.

Milan Kundera

Love, Strong, Eternity

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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.

Milan Kundera

Cutting, Tests, Unbearable

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and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

Milan Kundera

Soul, World, Body

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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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When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.

Milan Kundera

Views, Wife, Horizon

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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

Milan Kundera

Body

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

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In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

Milan Kundera

Book, Eye, Numbers

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If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy

Milan Kundera

Laughter, Echoes, Games

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The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!

Milan Kundera

Thinking, Novelists, Facts

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A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Milan Kundera

Beauty, Fashion, Laughter

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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Milan Kundera

Reality, Ideas, Gaps

"The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive". Book by Brian Christian, March 1, 2011.

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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.

Milan Kundera

Soccer, Football, Everyday

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Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day.

Milan Kundera

Wise, Mother, Dream

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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

Milan Kundera

Years, Important, Three

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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

Milan Kundera

Loyalty, Lasts, Virtue

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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Milan Kundera

Children, Questions And Answers, Serious

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While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Milan Kundera

Writing, Mean, People

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When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.

Milan Kundera

Revenge, Drama, Struggle

The Unbearable Lightness of Being pt. 3, ch. 10 (1984) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

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The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

Milan Kundera

Change, Dream, Fashion

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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.

Milan Kundera

Goodbye, Farewell, Thinking

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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.

Milan Kundera

Wall, Feelings, Mind

Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Milan Kundera

Giving, Unbearable, Birth

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This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment--beyond that boundary.

Milan Kundera

Girl, Emotion, Consciousness

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Born: April 1, 1929
Occupation: Writer
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