Quote

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

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
Change
Full
Provoke
Reason
Create
Eager
Better
Anyone
Shouting
Always
Interest
Provoking
Life
Future
Void
People
Political
Insult
Irritate
True
Destroy
Tempt
Past
Masters
Apathetic

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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.
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It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
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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!
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
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