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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

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
Statement
Statements
Intelligent
Intellectual
Therefore
Think
Thinking
Toothache

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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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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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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Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
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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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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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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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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
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...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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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
Milan Kundera
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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
Milan Kundera
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
Milan Kundera
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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
Milan Kundera
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
Milan Kundera