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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Mathematics
Improbability
Degrees
Equation
Exist
Equals
Value
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Propose
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Existential
Doe
Coincidence
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
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The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
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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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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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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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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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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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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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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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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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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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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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