Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 15

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The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.' 'Do I look like a liar?' 'You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.

Milan Kundera

Girl, Liars, Lying

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Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.

Milan Kundera

Jealousy, Touching, Quality

Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to the very last, the most important one, at this point a man must halt and stand firm if he doesn't want to begin life all over again with idle hands and a feeling of being shipwrecked.

Milan Kundera

Men, Hands, Order

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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

Milan Kundera

Fashion, Reading, May

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Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten.

Milan Kundera

Beautiful, Dream, Lying

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His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.

Milan Kundera

Medicine, People, Desire

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In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.

Milan Kundera

Cutting, Feet, Air

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Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: "Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.

Milan Kundera

Choices, Feelings, Individuality

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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

Milan Kundera

Memories, Escaping, Understood

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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Milan Kundera

Book, Ideas, People

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There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Milan Kundera

Love Is, Violence, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.

Milan Kundera

Flames, Essence, Body

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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Milan Kundera

Degrees, Doe, Coincidence

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At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

Milan Kundera

Morning, Moving, Adventure

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How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

Milan Kundera

Children, Sight, Soul

"Light but sound" by John Banville, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2004.

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Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

Milan Kundera

Children, Moving, Infancy

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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.

Milan Kundera

Children, Love Is, Essence

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The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen

Milan Kundera

Character, Self, Numbers

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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.

Milan Kundera

Art, Children, Race

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To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

Milan Kundera

Believe, Adults, Doe

"Ignorance". Book by Milan Kundera, 2000.

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If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

Milan Kundera

People, Doubt, World

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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

Milan Kundera

History, Reign, Ends

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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

Milan Kundera

Sadness, Way, Kind

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The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

Milan Kundera

Writing, Play, Doe

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Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

Milan Kundera

Laughter, Men, Hands

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Born: April 1, 1929
Occupation: Writer
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