Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Quotes
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
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.
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.
Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.
metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love
In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.
she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.
What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.
Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.
He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?