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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.

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
Tell
Value
Fickle
Anything
Principles
Guarantee
Self
Bits
Guarantees
Make
Impossible
Suicide
Would
Possible
Principle
Love
Values
Consider
Life
Less
Friendship
Wish
Build
Uncalled

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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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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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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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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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.
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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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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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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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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
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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 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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she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
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