Milan Kundera: Trending quotes

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Milan Kundera: 396 quotes10 likes

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), as quoted in Milan Kundera (2003) by Harold Bloom, [//books.google.it/books?id=SXDojRJFMPIC&pg=PA91 p. 91]
Context: True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

“She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”

“Metaphors are dangerous. 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.”

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.”

Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves

Source: Laughable Loves

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

Milan Kundera book Slowness

Source: Slowness

“Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Variant: ... because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: 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 book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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 book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being