Quote

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

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
Humans
Lying
Circles
Whole
Turns
Longing
Lightness
Men
Happiness
Ahead
Plight
Time
Happy
Straight
Therein
Running
Lies
Unbearable
Cannot
Line
Repetition
Doe
Turn
Circle
Human
Lines
Runs

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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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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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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
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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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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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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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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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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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