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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

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
Enough
Lightness
Unbearable
Weak
Leave
Hurt
Strong

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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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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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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
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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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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.
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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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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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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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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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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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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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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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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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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.
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