Quote

The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Milan Kundera

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Yearning
Caused
Greek
Return
Word
Suffering
Means
Mean
Nostalgia

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
Milan Kundera
Image
Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
Milan Kundera
Image
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
Milan Kundera
Image
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
Image
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
Milan Kundera
Image
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
Milan Kundera
Image
Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
Milan Kundera
Image
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
Image
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
Image
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
Milan Kundera
Image
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
Image
Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
Milan Kundera
Image
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Milan Kundera
Image
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera