Quote

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.

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
Look
According
Lightness
Looks
Present
Category
Need
Eyes
Unbearable
Needs
Four
Dreamer
Kind
Eye
Categories
People
Wish
Imaginary
Someone
Fourth
Rarest
Live
Divided
Dreamers

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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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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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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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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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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
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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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Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
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I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
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But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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