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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
Men
Happiness
Ahead
Plight
Time
Happy
Straight
Therein
Running
Lies
Unbearable
Cannot
Line
Repetition
Doe
Turn
Circle
Human
Lines
Runs
Humans
Lying
Circles
Whole
Turns
Longing
Lightness
More quotes by Milan Kundera
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
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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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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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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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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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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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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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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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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
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
