Quote

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Outside
Worth
Ability
Lying
Human
Extend
Humans
Oneself
People
Exist
Lies

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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
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I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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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.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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