Quote

...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.

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
Thing
Remarks
Way
Exist
Simply
Control
Quite
Feeling
Censor
Action
Remark
Feelings
Reproach

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
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Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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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.
Milan Kundera
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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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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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Milan Kundera
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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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Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera