Quote

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
Image
Essence
Eternal
Thought
Body
Shimmering
Temporal
Flame
Flames

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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.
Milan Kundera
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Milan Kundera
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
Milan Kundera
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
Milan Kundera
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How goodness heightens beauty!
Milan Kundera
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
Milan Kundera
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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
Milan Kundera
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Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
Milan Kundera
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Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
Milan Kundera
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Sad company is bad company.
Milan Kundera
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
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Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Milan Kundera
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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera