“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p 49
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Milan Kundera 198
Czech author of Czech and French literature 1929–2023Related quotes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“Life is so beautiful that even the idea of death must be born before it can be realized.”
A vida é tão bela que a mesma idéia da morte precisa de vir primeiro a ela, antes de se ver cumprida.
Source: Dom Casmurro (1899), Ch. 133, p. 255

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)
Context: The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller — whether or not it is true — about the possibilities of success.
The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.

"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.
And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.

“The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.”
The virtuous is frank and open; the non-virtuous is secretive and worrying. [by 朱冀平]
Source: The Analects, Other chapters

Freeman (1948), p. 166
Variant: Envy is the cause of political division.