Milan Kundera: Citations en anglais

“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”

“she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”

“The eye… the point where a person's identity is concentrated.”

“Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”

“Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.”

“In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.”

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.”

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.”

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.”

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

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.”

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”

“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.”

“There is no perfection only life”

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”