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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.

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
Moments
Unbearable
Thought
Astonishing
Make
Nostalgia
Worthy
Poetry
Existence
Purpose
Dazzle
Moment
Unforgettable

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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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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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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
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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.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Sad company is bad company.
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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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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