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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.

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
Dirty
Wine
Happiness
Everyone
Fingernails
Right
Imposing
People
Favor
Favors
Stupidity

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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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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
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For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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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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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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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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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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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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