Quotes from Milan Kundera

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

the less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic.

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with all it's sums and stars. But he finds it unbearable to be condemned to lose the second infinity as well, the one so close, so nearly within reach. Tamina lost the infinity of her love, I lost my father, we all lose whatever we do, because if it is perfection we are after, we must go to the heart of the matter, and we can never quite reach it.

Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more.

and I felt happy inside these songs (...) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and solu (...), where they dance in joy...

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.

birds of fortuity flutter down on her shoulders...

It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.

Tidak setiap perempuan pantas disebut sebagai seorang wanita.

On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.

La vida humana acontece sólo una vez y por eso nunca podremos averiguar cuáles de nuestras decisiones fueron correctas y cuáles fueron incorrectas. En la situación dada sólo hemos podido decidir una vez y no nos ha sido dada una segunda, una tercera, una cuarta vida para comparar las distintas decisiones.

In the sunet of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.

the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

Beauty by mistake' -- the final phase in the history of beauty.

given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love.

Si algo hay que realmente me ha disgustado del hombre es la forma en que su crueldad, su bajeza y su estrechez de miras se disfrazan de lirismo.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them 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.

Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. Beauty by mistake- the final phase in the history of beauty.

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 lives to come.

Extremes means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat