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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.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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BrĂ¼nn
Must
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Mistake
Seen
Ignominy
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Humiliation
Everyone
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Shame
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More quotes by Milan Kundera
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
Milan Kundera
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Milan Kundera
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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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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what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
Milan Kundera
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
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
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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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.
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
Milan Kundera