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The Unbearable Lightness of Being quotes
Milan Kundera
English
(67)
Français
(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
“isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”
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
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
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
“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
“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 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
“the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate.”
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
“Love is a battle . . . And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.”
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
“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has...”
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
“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
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“We all need someone to look at us.”
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
“it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”
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
“on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“love means renouncing strength”
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
“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
“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
“books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood.”
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
“she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
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
“If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”
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
“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
“Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”
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
“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
“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“You mean to say you hold your colleagues in such high esteem that you care what they think?”
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
“Centuries ago Calvinist faith turned the cathedral into a hangar, its only function being to keep the prayers of the faithful safe from rain and snow.”
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
“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.”
Milan Kundera
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
view all 67 quotes
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