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

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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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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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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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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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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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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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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.
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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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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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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