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

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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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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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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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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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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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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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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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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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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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