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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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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Another
Therefore
Attitudes
Men
Subjects
Teaches
Attitude
Element
Opinion
Opinions
Teach
Historical
Less
Subject
Calculable
Individual
Elements
Statistically
Experience
Mass
Imitate

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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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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 How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid?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.
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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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.
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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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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
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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.
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
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We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
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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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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
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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.
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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
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