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Optimism is the opium of the 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
Optimistic
Optimism
People
Opium

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
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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?
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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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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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
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There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera