Milan Kundera Quotes
Best 25 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Quotes by Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Quotes
“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
“Because to love is to renounce strength.”
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.”
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
“Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?”
“Is it right to raise one's voice when others are being silenced? Yes.”
“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
“Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.”
“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).”
“Man was not the planet's master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration.”
“No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.”
“Not until later did she understand that the word 'woman', on which he had placed such uncommon emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one of the two human sexes; it represented a value.”
“Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind's deepest needs.”
“People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles cease to exist.”
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“A tooth is much more to be prized than a diamond.”
“Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something – love – from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.”
“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
“Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.”
“Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.”
“Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”
“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
“Weight, necessity and value are three closely related terms: only what is necessary is heavy, only what weighs has value.”
“What can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
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“To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.”
You Might Like These Related Authors
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- Martin Heidegger
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- Yukio Mishima
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- Friedrich Nietzsche
- François Rabelais
- Salman Rushdie
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Israel Zangwill
Milan Kundera Sources
- All quotes by Milan Kundera (51 quotes)
- Farewell Waltz (1 quote)
- Identity (1 quote)
- Ignorance (2 quotes)
- Immortality (2 quotes)
- Laughable Loves (1 quote)
- Life is Elsewhere (1 quote)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1 quote)
- The Farewell Waltz (1 quote)
- The Joke (3 quotes)
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being (25 quotes)
- Other quotes by Milan Kundera (13 quotes)