Quote

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

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
Ideas
Meant
User
Tools
Hammer
Exactly
Hammers
Masters
Worker
Idea
Users
Stills
Tool
Approximate
Still
Master
Prevails
May
Workers
Handled

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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
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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 worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
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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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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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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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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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