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The Unbearable Lightness of Being quotes
Milan Kundera
English
(67)
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(58)
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“Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? . . . No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it...”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch...”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Love is a battle . . . And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“We all need someone to look at us.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“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
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“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
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which—they, too, unwilling to dash madly ahead—turn round and round the face, day in and...”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“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
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“the only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“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
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown...”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“In Kant's language, even 'Good morning,' suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare...”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Our dreams prove that to imagine . . . is among mankind's deepest needs.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“There are situations in which people are condemned to playact.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“love means renouncing strength”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory,...”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
view all 67 quotes
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