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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.

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
Today
Consists
Mean
Useless
Really
Useful
World
Morality
People
Highest
Told
Utility
Times
Implies
Doe
Contains

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
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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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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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The beauty of New York is unintentional it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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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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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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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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