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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

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
Enemy
Men
Love
World
Laughable
Joking
Barrier
Barriers
Poetry

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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 river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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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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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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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.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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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.
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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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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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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
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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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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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