Milan Kundera: Trending quotes (page 5)

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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