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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.

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
Lying
Truth
Unintelligible
Intelligible
Underneath
Chaos
Surface

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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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.
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I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect the value of all values.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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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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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 reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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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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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
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Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
Milan Kundera
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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
Milan Kundera
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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