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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
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University Teacher
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Brünn
Excludes
Kitsch
Unacceptable
Essentially
Existence
Human
Everything
Humans
Purview
More quotes by Milan Kundera
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
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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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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Milan Kundera
To die to decide to die that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
Milan Kundera
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
Milan Kundera
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Milan Kundera
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
Milan Kundera
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Milan Kundera
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
Milan Kundera
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
Milan Kundera
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
