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We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.

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
Mean
Removed
Later
Realize
Present
Realizing
Blindfolds
Understand
Blindfold
Means
Blindfolded
Past
Examine

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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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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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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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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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The beauty of New York is unintentional it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
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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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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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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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Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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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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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
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Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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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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