Milan Kundera Quotes

Jika ingin menghancurkan sebuah bangsa dan peradaban, hancurkan buku-bukunya; maka pastilah bangsa itu akan musnah.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves not others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up on his own free will is a monster. That is why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love a secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live the truth.

The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

This symmetrical composition- the same motif appears 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. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train), into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life... Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress... 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.

My dear
colleagues, as you know, the greatest misfortune for a man is a happy marriage; he hasn't the
slightest hope of a divorce.

لقد تأصل لدي عدم التصديق ، إلى حد أنه حين يفضي إليّ امرؤ بما يحب أو لا يحب ، لم أكن أحمل كل هذا على محمل الجد أو لم أكن ، بصورة أكثر دقة ، أرى فيه سوى مجرد شهادة على الصورة التي يريد إعطاءها عن نفسه !.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Everyone is wrong about the future. Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Love is poetry, poetry is love

The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.

اگر بلندپروازی نداشته باشی و تشنه موفق شدن و به رسمیت شناخته شدن نباشی در آستانه سقوط قرار میگیری

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

Even a life of suffering has a mysterious value. Even a life on the threshold of death is a thing of splendor. Anyone who has not looked death in the face does not know this, but I know it ...

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.