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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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Novelist
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Poet
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University Teacher
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Brünn
Life
Groundwork
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Rehearsal
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First
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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
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Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
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Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
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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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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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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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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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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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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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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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