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

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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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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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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.
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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
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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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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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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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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.
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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.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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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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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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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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