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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

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
Naive
Questions
Truly
Serious

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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
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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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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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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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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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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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...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.
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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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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...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.
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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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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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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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