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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.

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
Gives
Loses
Free
Everything
Giving
Men
Monster
Privacy
Monsters

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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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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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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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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
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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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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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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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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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