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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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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Firsts
Mankind
Succession
First
Second
Unbearable
Children
Says
Tear
Causes
Quick
Nice
Grass
Running
Flow
Two
Moved
Kitsch
Together
Tears
Lightness

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Milan Kundera
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we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
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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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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
Milan Kundera
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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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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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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.
Milan Kundera
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Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!
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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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what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Milan Kundera
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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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.
Milan Kundera
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But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
Milan Kundera
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Milan Kundera