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Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
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
Amazing
Illuminate
Darkness
Beam
Single
Multitude
Others
Multitudes
Light
Jealousy
Power
Keeping
Persons
Total
Person
Intense
More quotes by Milan Kundera
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
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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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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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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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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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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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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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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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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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she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
Milan Kundera
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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