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

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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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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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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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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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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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.
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The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
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I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect the value of all values.
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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
Milan Kundera