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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

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
Life
Gentleman
Seriously
Anyone
Lives
Cannot
Anything
Take
Gentlemen
Men
Ladies

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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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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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The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
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When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
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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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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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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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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!
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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