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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

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
Unfree
Unlearned
Liberty
Worst
Thing
World
People

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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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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 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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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
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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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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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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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