Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 9

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I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

Milan Kundera

Lying, Want, Madmen

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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Milan Kundera

Men, Giving, Monsters

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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.

Milan Kundera

Morning, Sleep, Blow

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The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

Milan Kundera

Heart, Feelings, Mind

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

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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

Milan Kundera

Wall, Dirty, Ideas

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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.

Milan Kundera

Real, Animal, Tests

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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.

Milan Kundera

Feelings, Doe, Elements

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The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.

Milan Kundera

Lying, Self Confidence, Differences

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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.

Milan Kundera

Evil, Borders, Fuzzy

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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

Milan Kundera

People, Feelings, Common

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

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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

Milan Kundera

Women, Pride, Rebel

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

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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?

Milan Kundera

Men, Gone, Masters

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What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Milan Kundera

Unique, People, Able

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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)

Milan Kundera

Joy, Rooftops, Saddest

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From the top of the staircase she sees the London train, modern and elegant, and she tells herself again: Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am moving at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.

Milan Kundera

Moving, Good Luck, Cheerful

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The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

Milan Kundera

New York, Independent, Design

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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

Milan Kundera

Lying, Mean, Doe

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Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

Milan Kundera

Self, Long, Hatred

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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.

Milan Kundera

Love, Inspirational, Relationship

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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.

Milan Kundera

Girl, Eye, Games

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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Milan Kundera

Water, Dying, Radio

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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Milan Kundera

Culture, Avalanches, Madness

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being". 1988.

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Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Milan Kundera

Art, Passion, Mean

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Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.

Milan Kundera

Book, Writing, Epidemics

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War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

Milan Kundera

War, Fighting, Years

"Immortality". Book by Milan Kundera, 1990.

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Born: April 1, 1929
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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