Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

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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
If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Milan Kundera
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Milan Kundera
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Milan Kundera
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Milan Kundera
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

Milan Kundera
The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

Milan Kundera
Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

Milan Kundera
Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say totalitarian, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree Be fruitful and multiply.

Milan Kundera
What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

Milan Kundera
It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.

Milan Kundera
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

Milan Kundera
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Milan Kundera
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Milan Kundera
Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Milan Kundera
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
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

Milan Kundera
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view) consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

Milan Kundera
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward 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
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

Milan Kundera
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Milan Kundera
...Of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, [...] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

Milan Kundera
"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

Milan Kundera
To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

Milan Kundera
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

Milan Kundera
The fact that until recently the word shit appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Milan Kundera
None among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Milan Kundera
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

Milan Kundera
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

Milan Kundera