Milan Kundera: Living

“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.”

“As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.”

“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”

“To laugh is to live profoundly.”

“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”

“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”

“Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.”

“Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”

“But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”

“He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.”

“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.”

“I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.”