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a man possessed with peace is always smiling

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
Possessed
Peace
Always
Men
Smiling

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Sad company is bad company.
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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.
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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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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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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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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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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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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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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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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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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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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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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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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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Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.
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