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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.

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
Deep
Gaze
Mankind
Relations
Probably
Test
Animal
Radical
Moral
Tests
Real
Mercy
Relation
Animals
Escapes

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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
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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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...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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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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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
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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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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.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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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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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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