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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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Brünn
Future
Past
Change
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People
Apathetic
Shouting
Masters
More quotes by 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
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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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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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
Milan Kundera
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
Milan Kundera
La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
Milan Kundera
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Milan Kundera
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
Milan Kundera
She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
Milan Kundera
The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Milan Kundera
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
Milan Kundera
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
Milan Kundera
