Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 3

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

  Milan Kundera

  Attitude, Compassion, Animal

  65 Copy quote

• Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

  Milan Kundera

  Questions And Answers, Serious, Naive

  "Nesnesitelna lehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Rain, Fall, Self

  41 Copy quote

• Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Dream, Communication, Games

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

  83 Copy quote

• Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

  Milan Kundera

  Love, Peace, Nature

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

  69 Copy quote

• Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

  Milan Kundera

  Decision, Granted, Reason

  14 Copy quote

• Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

  Milan Kundera

  Love, Sleep, Passion

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

  70 Copy quote

• Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

  Milan Kundera

  Jealousy, Dog, Evil

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  54 Copy quote

• The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

  Milan Kundera

  Real, Men, Air

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Perfect, Want, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

  53 Copy quote

• There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

  Milan Kundera

  Life, Mean, Decision

  90 Copy quote

• Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

  Milan Kundera

  Thinking, Europe, People

  17 Copy quote

• It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

  Milan Kundera

  Lying, Secret, Borders

  24 Copy quote

• We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

  Milan Kundera

  Eye, People, Dreamer

  31 Copy quote

• War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

  Milan Kundera

  War, Fighting, Years

  "Immortality". Book by Milan Kundera, 1990.

  4 Copy quote

• The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

  Milan Kundera

  New York, Independent, Design

  5 Copy quote

• I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.

  Milan Kundera

  Desire, Way, Feels

  "Farewell Waltz: A Novel". Book by Milan Kundera, 1976.

  59 Copy quote

• The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

  Milan Kundera

  Past, People, Want

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 17 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

  10 Copy quote

• There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Secret, Forget

  6 Copy quote

• All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Shadow, Empires

  13 Copy quote

• [W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Burden, Collapse

  11 Copy quote

• Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

  Milan Kundera

  Love, Beautiful, Two

  19 Copy quote

• Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

  Milan Kundera

  War, Mean, Men

  9 Copy quote

• The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Paradise, Longing

  18 Copy quote

• Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

  Milan Kundera

  Dream, Betrayal, Drawing

  41 Copy quote

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