Milan Kundera: Man

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. 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.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

“A man is responsible for his ignorance.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.”

“People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.”

“It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

“But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)”

“Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.”

“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”

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

“She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."”

“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”