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

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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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There is no perfection only life
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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
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When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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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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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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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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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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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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