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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
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Without
Bases
Matter
Shame
Feel
Choice
Must
Personal
Feels
Mistake
Seen
Ignominy
Choices
Humiliation
Everyone
Basis

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The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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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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Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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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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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
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How goodness heightens beauty!
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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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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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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Speak truth to power.
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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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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