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

— Milan Kundera , book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased y…" by Milan Kundera?

Milan Kundera 198

Czech author of Czech and French literature 1929–2023

Related quotes

“For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

In Gigi, and Selected Writings (1963).

“p>No suffering is self-caused.
Nothing causes itself.
If another is not self-made,
How could suffering be caused by another? If suffering were caused by each,
Suffering could be caused by both.
Not caused by self or by other,
How could suffering be uncaused?”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 14.8–9
trans. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), ISBN 0195093364

“The central problem of the Greek tragedies is why we suffer so at the hands of God. The movement that evoked Greek tragedy in the fifth century B. C. was spread over the East Mediterranean evoking a parallel response in Israel. …And as in Greek tragedy, Job deals with the problem of why man suffers so at the had of God.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

“You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Identity (1998), p 40

“We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

The Plan of Delano (1965)
Context: We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause. We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.