Quote

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

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
Others
Result
Malice
Part
Constant
Establish
Power
Among
Relations
Play
Emotion
Certainty
Never
Relationship
Individuals
Love
Results
Emotions
Individual
Charity
Antipathy
Inspirational
Relation
Predetermined

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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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Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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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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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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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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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 worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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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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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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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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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
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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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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
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