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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.

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
Essence
Eternal
Thought
Body
Shimmering
Temporal
Flame
Flames
Image

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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.
Milan Kundera
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
Milan Kundera
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
Milan Kundera
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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
Milan Kundera
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
Milan Kundera
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
Milan Kundera
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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
Milan Kundera
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
Milan Kundera
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
Milan Kundera
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan Kundera