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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

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
Perhaps
Virtue
Lasts
Puerile
Last
Remaining
Unlike
Loyalty
Conviction
Friend

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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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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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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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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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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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Speak truth to power.
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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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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.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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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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