“ Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 114
“ Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 1.7K
“ For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. ”
- Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being- Copy
- 3.3K
“ 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. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 2.1K
“ To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. ”
- Milan Kundera Identity- Copy
- 2.4K
“ Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 915
“ You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 2.4K
“ 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- Copy
- 3.4K
“ He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 288
“ Oh 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- Copy
- 1.4K
“ Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. 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 demandfree and asking for nothing but his company. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 239
“ Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. 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 demandfree and asking for nothing but his company. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 909
“ 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 demandfree and asking for nothing but his company. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 276
“ 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. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 2.9K
“ We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and aweinspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 3.2K
“ And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 3K
“ Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 2.5K
“ He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 3.1K
“ Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image and has intestines! or God lacks intestines and man is not like him. The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate." Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 929
“ If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es Muss sein! ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 2.8K
“ (God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 744
“ I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 2.4K
“ For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 274
“ I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think? Well, tell me!' His brother was silent and Edward went on: 'If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told a man the truth to his face, it would mean I was taking him seriously. And to take something so unimportant seriously means to become less than serious oneself. I, you see, must lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become one of them myself. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 1.1K
“ What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating. ”
- Milan Kundera- Copy
- 1.8K
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18